[Osmf-talk] For Community Consultation: OSMF Strategic, Plan Version 2

[Allan Mustard]

I did a fair amount of strategic planning while in government service, 
at the agency level as well as at the overseas post level, and have the 
following reactions:

* a "North Star" is set in a vision or mission statement, not in a 
strategic plan
* strategic plans don't typically go into lots of specifics, such as 
mechanisms. When FDR, Churchill and Stalin wrote the strategic plan for 
WWII, it was three pages long and omitted mechanisms. That was the plan 
for multinational armies and navies comprising several million service 
members and billions of dollars in expenditures across multiple 
continents--on three pages. Specifics are for the tactical planning stage.
* budgeting is different from strategic planning, and so is construction 
of a timeline. At most a strategic plan will include general time 
horizons, but it is not a Gantt chart. A budget will naturally fall out 
of a strategic plan as it is developed.

Serious funding organizations will look at both the strategic plan and 
the budget, as well as other management controls (audit, etc.)  All of 
this will not be incorporated into a strategic plan, but will be part of 
the overall management structure of the project.

cheers,
apm

> Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2023 01:21:41 +0000
> From: Steve Coast<steve at stevecoast.com>
> To: OSMF Talk<osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org>
> Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] For Community Consultation: OSMF Strategic
> 	Plan Version 2
> Message-ID:<A03BAD8E-4119-4FFC-AD86-FC34EB25BBEA at stevecoast.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> This plan is shorter than the prior version but not better.
>
> * It fails to set a motivational goal, direction, or ?North Star? for the community to follow.
>    * Instead, it alludes to things generally being better in the future somehow (for example, section 3.4)
> * The mechanism for things to get better is omitted
> * Items have no budget, timeline or Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). It will be difficult, bordering naive, to approach any serious funding organization with a menu of unbudgeted, ungoverned tasks with no success criteria or timeline.