Agenda - Council Work Session - 02/19/2013 - Strategic Planning

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Ramsey Final Report Grant No. 05 -1237 City of Ramsey Lessons Learned 1. Have the Right Team: A good planning team is like a team in any sport, it needs a variety of people with a variety of skills. These include: writing and communications, technology, planning methodologies and experience, team building. The team should have between 3 -7 members as the core group. Any fewer and the work does not get done; any more and there are too many voices. We found that as team members' schedules tended to get overwhelmed having five members on the team meant that someone could always be free to pick up whatever needed to be done. 2. Have the Right Tools: There are a variety of planning tools and techniques out there, but the most important part of the process is to match the tool to the task. Too many consultants or groups operate with a set methodology or approach which may work at some times, but not others. As someone put it to the consultants working o0n the comp plan, but no this project, "Don't ever show me any of those dots again." A subrule might be to "use the Internet." Our web site enabled us to collaborate much more effectively. 3. Have Collaboration with City Staff and Council: This project would have never succeeded without the blessing of both staff and council. Council allowed staff to serve as the City's voice in the project. There was little micromanaging. Staff could not have been more supportive. They worked overtime many nights on project meetings and always made sure that whatever was needed was made available. 4. Don't Be Afraid to Fail or Change Course: In the third part we had planned on using more open methods such as rapid Open Space, but the group preferred the structure and speed of weighted voting with Nominal Group Technique. This puts more of the pressure for success on the facilitator, but does move the process faster. 5. Have the Right Experts: The consultants who worked with this project all had one thing in common —none of them were preachers. The difference between consultants who preach and those who teach is extremely important for the success of a project like this. Our consultants all saw their role as teaching the community about planning ideas and then letting them make the choices. 6. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: More projects fail because of lack of communication than any other reason. Looking back on the times when this project had the most difficulty, almost all of those problems could be traced back to imperfect communication. 7. Meet Frequently and "Git Er Done ": Originally we did not want to burn out community members by scheduling meeting too close together, but we found that especially in Part 3, we made the most progress when we met once a week with the idea of getting done what needed to be done. To ask for commitment on this level requires a very detailed agenda with explanations of why tasks are necessary. The Open Space Sessions last Summer may have suffered from being held too far apart. Momentum had to be rebuilt if the time between sessions was longer than two weeks. 8. Honor Everyone: As fans of the famous Henry Fonda movie, "Twelve Angry Men" can testify, sometimes it is the holdout, the lone voice who may be the voice of reason. This is why trying to work - 22 -