Strategic Planning When the Ground is Moving

Melissa Kraft, Chief Information Officer, City of Frisco

Strategic planning has traditionally been about defining priorities, building a roadmap and executing against it over a set period of time. Over the past year, it has become clear that this approach no longer reflects reality. The environment, in which organizations operate, particularly in fast-growing communities, has shifted too quickly. Planning for the next three years now requires a fundamentally different mindset.

One of the most important changes has been a move away from planning around projects and toward planning around capabilities. Rather than asking what systems to deploy, effective strategic planning now starts with the question of what capabilities must the organization have to operate, scale and recover under changing conditions? This includes the ability to support major events without disrupting daily services, to maintain situational awareness during incidents and to make timely, data-informed decisions across departments. When strategy is built around capabilities, investments become more intentional and sequencing becomes clearer.

Another critical lesson has been the need to plan for peak demand, not average conditions. Rapid growth, large-scale events and heightened public expectations expose assumptions that once went unchallenged. Strategic planning increasingly includes honest assessments of whether networks, applications and supporting infrastructure can withstand sudden surges, outages or partial failures. Disaster recovery and continuity planning are no longer separate technical exercises; they are now central to strategic conversations about service reliability and public trust.

Workforce capacity has also emerged as a defining constraint. Over the past year, it has become evident that organizations cannot continue to expand responsibilities without addressing how work is sustained. Strategic planning must account for staffing realities, specialized skill requirements and the risk of burnout. This has shifted planning discussions toward clarifying ownership, investing in cross-functional skills and making deliberate decisions about scope. A strategy that does not acknowledge workforce limits is not ambitious, it is unsustainable.

“Alignment does not happen through documentation alone; it happens through consistent, intentional communication.”

Data and artificial intelligence have similarly matured from innovation opportunities into governance challenges. As demand for analytics, dashboards and automation has increased, so has the need for structure. Strategic planning now requires clear answers to who owns data standards, how quality is maintained and how ethical and operational risks are assessed before solutions are deployed. The lesson of the past year is that scaling data and AI is less about technology and more about accountability and trust.

Execution has become another focal point. Traditional strategies often outlined initiatives without addressing decision rights or trade-offs. In practice, progress depends on governance of who makes prioritization decisions, how conflicts are resolved and how success is measured. Without these mechanisms, even well-intentioned strategies struggle to move from paper to practice.

Finally, communication has proven essential. Strategy must be understood not only by leadership but across the organization. Translating multi-year goals into clear, plain language and reinforcing how individual work connects to broader outcomes has become a core leadership responsibility. Alignment does not happen through documentation alone; it happens through consistent, intentional communication.

As organizations look ahead to the next three years, strategic planning is no longer about predicting the future. It is about creating focus, resilience and decision clarity in an environment defined by change. The most effective strategies today are not static plans; they are living frameworks that help organizations remain steady while the ground continues to move beneath them.

Key Takeaways:

What Modern Strategic Planning Must Include for Local Government

• Capability-based planning, not just project lists

• Peak-demand and resilience assumptions

• Workforce sustainability and role clarity

• Data and AI governance built into strategy

• Clear decision rights and execution governance.

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