Connecticut Government Needs Strategic Planning - and Execution - Now

This entry ties in to my entry from last year, “Wanted: A Sharper Vision for CT’s Economic Agenda” – a wish that remains unfulfilled.

In my fifteen years as an attorney in state government, it’s been my experience that it’s the rare commissioner who states what he or she intends to achieve during their tenure and communicates it throughout the agency. I’ve been shocked by the disdain for goal-setting I’ve heard articulated among the highest levels of management. Performance goals, when required, are routinely set in arrears. As the current Lisa Moody hearings emphasize, blurring the lines of accountability is an institutionalized practice at all levels. We can do better. In fact, we must.

Charging commissioners with articulating, communicating and achieving specific goals and objectives would be a major step toward promoting accountability and transparency in government, and ultimately, toward restoring the public's trust in government.

Connecticut government, starting with its governor, needs to figure out 1) what it wants to accomplish, 2) the specific steps it will take to get there, and 3) precisely who is responsible for completing those steps. This is not rocket science, and other state governments have done it.

Some of the strategic planning things we need to do have fallen within OPM’s jurisdiction, although staffing for strategic planning functions has been eviscerated (which just goes to show how important we think it is to invest in planning).

Besides, strategic planning efforts across the executive branch of government have taken place at too low a level (that too just goes to show how important we think planning is). Executive branch strategic planning—and specifically performance review – needs to happen at the level of the Governor’s Office for it to be meaningful and taken seriously.

It is reasonable to expect the Governor, her chief of staff, and the Office of Policy and Management (OPM) as the Governor’s management arm, to ensure that state agencies complement, and not undermine, the work of other agencies. The Governor and her chief of staff need to mind the store and require monthly progress toward agency performance goals. A few thoughts for this strategic planning initiative include:

• Articulating the Governor's principles for good government, or even a Governor's strategic plan for the state. Georgia’s done it. A plan for the state – what a concept.
• Establishing a properly staffed, high level, strategic planning function to ensure that state agencies, through their strategic plans, support the Governor’s clearly stated goals.
• Charging agency commissioners, as de facto CEOs, with articulating, communicating, and achieving their visions and goals for the agency.
• Holding agency commissioners accountable for planning for such things as benchmarking, continuous improvement, internal communication, succession planning and leadership development, fostering positive relations with employee unions, ethics education, and publishing their strategic plans and updated progress reports on their agency's website.
• Exploring a performance-based compensation system for a meaningful portion of commissioners' pay.

Connecticut earned an uninspiring C+ in the 2005 Government Performance Project’s ranking of states’ performance (http://results.gpponline.org). One OPM official was quoted there as saying “Not much is happening [on performance measurement.] I wouldn’t even say not much. Nothing is happening at a statewide level.” Unless a C+ economy is good enough, this is not okay. We can do better. In fact, we must.