I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

Citizens, staff and elected leaders in the City of Manassas, Va., offer a prescription for how to build a healthy strategic plan

Manassas, Va., is proof positive there's never bad time to launch a strategic plan. The city of 43,000 in the Washington D.C. metro area rolled out “Manassas 2025: Five Year Strategic Action Plan” right as COVID-19 flipped the world on its head.

Undaunted, the good people of Manassas set about implementing their plan. The goals articulated in the plan weren’t dependent on whether you wore a mask or got the jab. Pandemics come and go — which is not to minimize the impact of COVID — but there will always be a need for governments to think and act strategically. If we’re not developing plans, then we should be executing those plans. Once a year, we should be reviewing those plans and making adjustments based on changing circumstances. Whether the virus came from a lab leak or the Wuhan wet market has no bearing on whether it makes sense for a group of Virginians to think about where they’re going and how they’re going to get there.

So why the hell not get started when the world is losing its collective marbles?

By my reading — and the testimony of my trusted friend and city Communications Director Patty Prince — the folks in Manassas assured the community’s good health and forward progress in uncertain times by creating a plan that meets the Good Government Files criteria for kick-ass quality. I’ll enumerate them below. Let’s start where all good planning efforts start:

1. A well-crafted citizen participation program

Patty credits City Manager Pat Pate for spearheading the plan, and for leading a process built on a citizen engagement program that ensured the plan wasn’t a top-down effort yet also ensured City Council ownership. That’s not easy to do. It takes time and patience, something often in short supply among elected leaders these days.

Manassas utilized a combination of quantitative and qualitative input at the beginning of the process.

The city surveys the community every two years, and those surveys include questions that provide citizens the opportunity to rank areas they’d like the city to focus on. The city held a pair of Community Conversations “to add first person depth to the empirical survey results,” according to the plan. “Both rounds of Community Conversations provided a great deal of useful information about community priorities and visions.”

In May 2019, the City Council reviewed the input gathered from the survey and those public meetings to consider 11 topic areas. Working in teams, Councilmembers narrowed that down to five priority areas they believed “would have the greatest impact on the community’s future over the next five years,” according to the plan.

Now it was time for another round of public meetings. Community Workshops drew on 40 community partners and residents to fine tune and develop goals and objectives for addressing the issues identified by the City Council. The group convened four times between October 2019 and January 2020 before presenting their work at the City Council’s annual retreat in January 2020.

That kind of back and forth between the community and city officials ensures a healthy dialogue as the plan is being developed. Neither side should be surprised as the process moves forward. That iterative process, in my experience, is a big factor in getting to informed consent. (You can read more about that in this post.) The public may not agree with the final product, but they can’t say they didn’t have legit opportunities along the way to have their voices heard and considered.

Here are the five priorities that resulted from that well-considered, deliberative citizen participation process:

Community Vitality
We will be a city that celebrates and promotes the safety, diversity and character of our community, working together to build pride in our neighborhoods.

Economic Prosperity
We will be a city where the combination of an entrepreneurial spirit, an involved business community, and a supportive economic development presence results in growing businesses, a thriving, active community, and a strong sense of place
and opportunity.

Transformative Mobility
We will be a city that balances all modes of transportation, providing appropriate infrastructure and leveraging technologies to sustain a safe, environmentally responsible, integrated, and well-functioning transportation system that meets the expectations of our diverse community.

Educational Attainment
We will be a city that partners with the education and business community to create an innovative, engaging, inspiring and challenging learning environment for all students and adult learners that fuel the workforce of tomorrow.

Sustaining Excellence
We will be an inclusive organization that reflects our community and embraces excellence by applying our core values of Customer Service, Honesty, Integrity, Respect, Stewardship and Teamwork to everything that we do in order to create a better life for our community.

I don’t know about you, but those are the priorities of a city I’d like to live in. Which brings me to the second great thing about the Manassas plan and what all strategic plans should strive for.

2. It’s well-written, using plain language

There’s no jargon, which is huge. Another huge point is that it’s aspirational without being pie-in-the-sky. I see no cynicism-inducing platitudes in those priority statements.

The plain language runs throughout the plan, but I especially like the introduction, which simply explains the need for communities to create these kinds of plans. Here it is:

Why Plan?

Strategic planning is one way that local governments and communities deal with both anticipated and unforeseen challenges. It is intended to enhance the City’s ability to think, act, and learn strategically. It can help clarify and resolve the most important issues we face as well as help us to build on strengths and minimize our weaknesses. Ultimately, planning is proposed to make the city as an organization more effective in both service delivery and in supporting the Manassas community. Put more simply, we plan so that we can identify where we are going and how we are going to get there.

So how will folks in Manassas know when they get there? Simple. The plan features quantifiable “Success Measures,” many of which are tied to citizen satisfaction, as measured by the city’s biennial surveys. (Here’s my discourse on why you should be doing regular surveys. Here’s the TLDR: guessing at public opinion is for losers.)

3. Use quality metrics to measure success

Accompanying the well-crafted statements for the priorities listed above are sets of goals. For example, for the Community Vitality priority, the Goals are:

1. Quality Housing

2. Preserve Neighborhood Character

3. Exceptional Public Spaces

4. Enhance Older Neighborhoods

5. Improve Citizen Satisfaction​

So, let’s drill down on Goal 1, Quality Housing. Here’s the goal statement: Increase the supply of quality housing options that serve people with diverse and unique needs by working with private developers on new construction and encouraging private investment and renovation of existing older homes.

Again, I love the clear, direct language. So how will that goal be accomplished? The plan lists the following Objectives:

1.1 Foster a balance of high quality and attractive new housing types through the development process to serve an increasingly diverse population.  

1.2 Encourage private investment and renovation of existing older homes.

1.3 Increase the number of residents that own their own homes and reduce the number of renters and homeowners who are cost burdened (spending more than 30% of their income on housing.)

1.4 Expand housing options with universal design options for City residents that would like to age-in-place and have differing abilities.

Boom. Which leads us right to the metrics that will show whether progress has been made. Here are the Success Measures for Goal 1.

1. The percentage of residents who are satisfied with the availability of quality housing will rise in the 2022 citizen survey from 47% to 55%.

2. The number of residents who own their own homes will grow 5% over the next five years.

3. The percentage of cost burdened residents will decrease 5% over the next five years.

4. The number of property owners who take advantage of the City’s residential rehabilitation and reinvestment programs will grow 10% over the next five years.

One more massive thing to love about the plan is how easy it is for the community to see if progress is being made. There’s a “Tracking Success” tab on the plan website that pulls in data from the biennial surveys to show satisfaction levels for the objectives listed in the plan.

I’ll have more on the plan web interface at end. I’m saving the best for last.

4. The plan drives the budget and CIP process

Let’s go way back to my second ever GGF post to explain why this is critical. I was writing about the challenge of communicating budgets and tax rates.

Budgets are the clearest expression of an elected body’s priorities. Simply put, what’s important is what gets funded.

That’s good news, because you should be talking about strategic priorities, i.e., what’s important, when you’re talking about spending decisions. A Good Government Truism is that folks need to know you’re not just making this stuff up as you go along. You’re actually making decisions according to long-range plans that look at community needs (and wants) that are in line with what folks are willing to pay in taxes and fees.

A good strategic plan simplifies the budget process. In fact, having the City Council review and update its strategic priorities should be the first step in developing the next year’s fiscal budget. Patty tells me that’s exactly what happens in Manassas. In fact, when I asked her what the greatest value was in having their strategic plan, she said, “First of all, we use it for everything in the budget.”

“We have it (the budget) broken down by our five strategic priorities, and every department uses it,” she said. “It’s clear that, ‘These are my priorities for the next five years.’ So that’s worked fabulously.”

That helps the staff understand how what they’re doing in their departments fits into the overall strategic direction of the community. I’m reminded of a story I heard long ago (not sure if it’s apocryphal, but it’s a good one and relevant so you’re gonna hear it) about a group of journalists on a tour of a NASA facility back in the 1970s. They came upon a janitor and one of the reporters asked him what he was doing. “I’m helping to put a man on the moon,” he replied.

So it is with the strategic action plan in Manassas.

“Everything we do is based on that strategic plan,” Patty says.

And that is key to the city achieving what is the final priority listed in the plan: Sustaining Excellence.

5. The Values listed in the plan are lived out by employees

Here’s that priority again so you don’t have to scroll back to the top:

Sustaining Excellence
We will be an inclusive organization that reflects our community and embraces excellence by applying our core values of Customer Service, Honesty, Integrity, Respect, Stewardship and Teamwork to everything that we do in order to create a better life for our community.

I like to think of Values like this: If the strategic plan lays out a roadmap for where we’re going, values are how co-workers are going to treat each other along the way.

When I think about my career in public service, what made it so special was the people I got to work with. And they were people who had the kind of values on display in Manassas: honesty, integrity, respect, stewardship, teamwork. Frankly, I think great customer service is a natural by-product of those other values.

Patty tells me they’ve produced videos about their values, and workers from throughout the organization, from police and fire to public works and the library, can all get “pretty close” when asked to list the organization’s values. That’s no small thing. That tells me that, in Manassas, their values are not just words on a poster in the break room people pass by and ignore on the way to get their morning coffee.

“Our mayor has caught on to it,” Patty says. “She says the values at every council meeting.”

6. The plan website is freaking awesome

The biggest surprise for me was the plan website was built on ArcGIS and it functions beautifully. If you haven’t gone to check out the plan website already, please do so now. Everything is on one screen. It’s intuitive to navigate and includes a ton of great, engaging photos — including many of the public servants in Manassas out in the community.

To be honest (and apologies to my friends and readers in IT), I’ve always been disappointed in ArcGIS. It never seemed to be able to live up to its promise of delivering content to non-technical users, i.e., the public, via a simple user interface in a compelling way.

Well, color my mind changed. Patty says I need to pay homage Margaret Montgomery, the IT/GIS goddess in Manassas who built the strategic plan website. Patty said the ArcGIS folks call Margaret for advice. I’m glad to hear it! She’s apparently cracked the code. Margaret, if you’re reading this, thank you. It is truly magnificent. Residents in Manassas are lucky to have you.

Here’s a few screen grabs because I know the vast majority of you don’t click links.

Needless to say, it’s a massive pile of work to create a plan on this order of excellence. But it’s oh-so worth it. For public servants, there’s real pride in making a tangible difference in our communities. For elected leaders, it forces them to keep their eyes on strategic outcomes and (God willing) out of the weeds of the day to day business of government. For our residents — especially those blessed few who bring their better angels to public meetings — they get to have a meaningful say in the direction of their community.

It’s the ultimate win-win-win.

Onward and Upward.