Welcome to the "virtual strategic planner" website. My name is Al Holmes. I have facilitated hundreds of strategic planning sessions over the past couple of decades. I created this website because I noticed that a significant amount of the time spent in strategic planning sessions is consumed by activities that involve the collection, sorting, assessment and analysis of information and opinion from participants. While this activity is essential to planning, I felt that much of it could have been handled more effectively by allowing each participant to answer questions privately, with as much time as needed, in advance of face to face meetings. The precious meeting time could then be used to discover areas of agreement and build on them and to explore and understand areas of divergence without personalizing them. A recent user commented, "... I see more than ever the usefulness of the surveys to lead the discussion."
The main barrier to collecting and analysing information in advance of planning meetings has been the time that it takes to survey stakeholders and the associated high cost of consultant time to do the work. Thanks to advances in technology, the time and, as a result, the costs have been reduced dramatically. On-line survey providers have made it easy to collect information from a large number of people in a short period of time and to present an analysis of the results instantly. Combine this with advances made in online project management and you wonder if you ever have to meet face-to-face.
We have been using some of these tools for several years and our clients have found them very helpful. We have taken our most useful tools and made them accessible through this website. You can try them as they exist or shape them to your unique needs.
ON LINE SURVEYS We use industry leader Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) to power our online surveys. Using the survey tools on this website you can .......
ONLINE PROJECT COORDINATION We use Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) to help manage strategic planning projects. There, clients can login, track milestones, track to-do items, share ideas, communicate with others on steering committees, access important documents, link to surveys, link to survey results and so on. We have set up a generic strategic planning project on basecamp to demonstrate how this can work for you. E-mail us for an invitation to login to the site.
MIND MAPPING SOFTWARE We sometimes use mind mapping software from Mindjet to develop ideas, to help visualize the interconnection of plan components and keep track of the multiple documents that can be generated on a long, multi-component planning process.
On our site, you can also find models to guide you through each step of your planning process. Click on any of the above headings to find out more about each.
If you are not a user but would like to become one, click here.
Are you a planning facilitator? All of the tools on this website are available to you so that you can use them with your clients. Click here for more information or E-mail us for prices and process.
" Excellent opportunity to review where we are, where we have come from and where we should go !! (vision, strategy & implementation)... Look forward to the questionnaire and (re)assessment from and by the partnership " CEO of a Medical Clinic
