How can I plan for the long term when the business is trapped in a short term cycle?

The situation

The four year election cycle is seen as a major impediment to long term planning. When you’re tasked to plan major capital works that will last for 10 to 20 years this represents a real problem.

Grosvenor facilitated a service delivery review which helped a major Victorian Government Department to understand what services it needed to deliver from which sites.

The challenge

Faced with an ever reducing capital budget and an ever increasing set of demands, the Department set out to create a 10 year strategic accommodation plan. With over 100 regional locations to plan for, the centralised property team needed to understand what the business’s long term plans were to enable proper planning for their limited capital budgets.

The problem was that planning for 10 years just wasn’t something that they could do. Years of constant change and the upheaval associated with shifts in policy direction meant that the planning horizon had shortened to the point where managers were only able to deal with next year’s issues.

The project

Grosvenor were tasked with development of the plan by engaging with regional and divisional business leaders. By taking a step back, Grosvenor designed a process whereby regional managers were able to take themselves out of the day to day and think about what services needed to be delivered from which site and why. This ‘service delivery plan’ was then able to be used to determine the likely impact to staffing over the long term and from that, the priorities for site upgrades and refurbishments.

The result

This simple planning exercise enabled the property team to plan with confidence. As a side benefit, the business leaders had a much clearer understanding of their business and how to plan for the future with limited capital budgets.

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