Responsibilities and Timelines

Responsibilities and Timelines add the detail that guides the Team in implementation of the Goal. Most often, responsibilities are linked to a particular strategy or set of strategies. Assign all team members active roles. Naming both the person and their title/agency assists in creating a complete record of who did what to refer to in the future, especially as Team members change.

Ensure that all Team members are assigned responsibilities that give them active involvement in implementing the plan. All Core Team members need to maintain a high level of commitment to the work. Uneven participation among the Team members can brew dissention and resentment, which are counterproductive to making change.

Everyone on the Core Team should be expected to have active responsibilities for implementing the plan. Being a member of a core team for strategic planning is not a spectator sport! Having every Core Team agency actively engaged in planning and putting place the strategies adds legitimacy to work across the board. Colleagues from any agency can ‘see’ themselves as having a role in the future work, when someone from the agency they represent is modeling how a multi agency team performs.

Establish a target date for each strategy to begin and end. A timeline provides the busy Team member(s) with a time frame for completing responsibilities that they can schedule into their day-to-day duties.

When the Team’s plan contains multiple goals, strategically spread start and end dates over a longer time span. It’s not practical for the Team to attempt to implement multiple actions at the same time. Review all the goals in the plan to determine the most effective order of implementation. It may flow naturally for some goals to be implemented before others; some goals may have a more ‘ideal’ window of time for implementation than others; there may be standing obligations for some agencies at certain times of the year to avoid, such as mandated training, conferences, etc. There may be some overlap – the Team can best determine how much members can take on at one time.