Talk:Strategy/Archive/Overview of strategy

Redirect to:

• Talk:Strategy consultation

Please leave general feedback regarding the Strategic Plan 2014-2019, and this consultation process, on this page.

"Open" is not the same as "free"

By adopting the (complex) OKF definitions and removing the requirement for free access, this proposal weakens the scope of the charity. If the intention is to ensure that our projects preserve knowledge in ways that are both open and free, then we must unambiguously use the word free. --Fæ (talk) 10:04, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Can we keep this discussion in one place please, this page is for general feedback. For discussion of the suggested Vision, Values, and Mission please see here Sjgknight (talk) 10:12, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Where is cost management or monitoring effective and efficient operations?

Plans are characterized by time, resources and deliverables. The language used in Strategic plan 2014-2019 means that outcomes are deliverables and time will be given by annual measurements. However I can see no limit on resources, even though I can see "process" goals under "Use best practice governance and resource management processes". Without any limit on resources (cost) or specific high level targets, this leaves operations free to increase costs of running the organization disproportionate to the benefits that the charity delivers or to continuously renegotiate any interim target year on year or throughout the year.

Considering that the administrative costs or internal costs of running the charity already uses 50% of the donated funds rather than being spent directly on outcomes, it would seen sensible to set resource targets that make the charity more efficient year on year (for example a target of making the charity overall 5% more efficient at delivering end outcomes every year). Looking at Progress on Outcomes I can see nothing that provides the trustees with measures they might need to hold the CEO to account on how effective or efficient the charity is by measuring the ratios for effectiveness and efficiency at the end of the year compared to the targets agreed at the beginning of the year. In most charities targets for being effective and efficient are key performance measures for their senior management. --Fæ (talk) 23:31, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this point. I'll reply with just a few points around our rationale but see para below re: high level targets:

• The board is currently working on the best means and presentation for 'reports to the board'. This will in part address the way the board has inputs (costs) and outputs (towards our charitable outcomes) reported.
• 'Resources' certainly are a factor - they are our 'input' in the model here and extend beyond direct incurred costs
• We cannot set limits on resources where we do not know our budget year on year. However, two things are certainly accounted for in working on activity planning: 1) we can be pretty sure our budget won't grow by over a certain percentage, and 2) any growth in operational costs should be reflected in our progress on outcomes
• To an extent I would expect to see such resource restrictions in our activity plan (which is operational) not our strategic plan (see points made at Strategic plan 2014-2019)
• What we're trying to do is create a model to track year on year progress. Without a model, we cannot do that (and outputs/their mapping to outcomes, etc. can vary), so we have no baseline measurement against which to chart our progress. (added 08:40, 4 February 2014 (UTC))
• Also, as a slight aside, we should not conflate performance indicators of the charity (i.e., how is the charity performing against its goals) with staff appraisal. The former relates to the latter of course, but our purpose here is to outline success for the charity.

With regard to high level targets, note Measures and targets which does indeed define some high level targets. We would certainly welcome comment, solutions, critique, etc. here. These targets are on a year on year, so your point re: inputs should perhaps be clarified further in that document (otherwise we're open to the charge that one could simply disproportionately increase funds for activity in order to meet a target. Although note this would likely have knock on effect on other outputs, would be seen by the board in our reports, could only be done within the constraints of the budget and flexibility of the activity plan, and at times might be a desirable thing if a program is particularly successful, or some other reason as noted inStrategic plan 2014-2019). Cheers Sjgknight (talk) 08:08, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

This is very simple and does not need long justifications. The board can agree that the efficiency goal for the charity is to be 5% more efficient in 2014 compared to 2013. It is then up to the CEO to decide how to credibly measure and report on it. Efficiency is not directly related to the amount of funding, however any gains/losses related to economies of scale would be part of the end of year analysis explaining the efficiency achieved. An organization that cannot measure its efficiency is in deep hot water. --Fæ (talk) 11:31, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

While there's no limit on resources set in the plan, there will naturally be a limit on resources; and as you point out, there is an implicit commitment to consider efficiency in the goal relating to effective governance and resource management. However, given where we are at, I think it's sensible to retain a focus on demonstrating impact and effectiveness rather an introducing an explicit efficiency target. The Land (talk) 18:28, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

I find this on-going defence of not wanting to measure efficiency bizarre, it is one of the most basic measures for any organization. Right now, the charity is on record as running at a poor 50% efficiency (I know of no other chapter that is less efficient than this). If in 2014 efficiency gets even worse than this, how could that not be a major risk to the future of this charity, as not only will it be raised again during the next FDC bid process as evidence of poor management of funds, but potential donors will be put off by the idea than of their £10 donation more than £5 vanishes into "administration/non-project stuff" and the board of trustees have a track record of not asking about it or asking senior management to improve operations? --Fæ (talk) 20:49, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi Fae - I disagree with your assertion that the charity is running at "50% efficiency". The Land (talk) 21:53, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Fae, your statement that "the charity is on record as running at a poor 50% efficiency" is completely wrong. You first calculated your own figure (stated then to be "47.6%") in a discussion here based on what you called "common sense" and what you felt that "any member of the charity would assume". As you were clearly told then, and I need clearly to repeat now, is that based on standard performance ratios, defined by the Charity Commission in their Statement of Recommended Practice, as at the end of Q2 2013 our Charitable projects accounted for 69% of total expenditure. You may not understand the Statement of Recommended Practice, but that does not excuse your repeating a figure of your own devising that you were explicitly told three months ago was wrong, based on figures provided by professionals who most certainly do. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:42, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

47.6% was based on the published accounts and using an extremely straightforward calculation based on internal administrative costs versus project spend. If you wish to define an alternative common-sense calculation and start tracking it as a Key Performance Indicator for efficiency, that would be great as I would not have to calculate my version again.

By the way, your figure of 69% being spent on "charitable projects" I believe includes both the large bills for lawyer fees, the large bill for consultants and the significant costs over the year of having board meetings. I expect that most members and active volunteers would call these "internal costs" rather than "projects", especially as unpaid volunteers and non-trustees do not get a say in those costs or get to see the legal advice, sit in on in-camera board discussions or talk to the consultants; this is how I am using the term "common sense".

It would seem remarkably unfair to assess the performance of the charity on your figure in the coming year if all of these 2013 costs are considered project costs, as if the legal and consultant fees are one-off governance related costs, but still counted as part of a 100% efficient spending on projects, then it will be hard for operations to match that ratio of project vs. administration in 2014 when we are not supposed to be spending so much on lawyers and similar. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:56, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Consultation seems too late in the process

The process for consultation with members and volunteers seems geared to resist change, as the full five year sets of goals and their measures have been proposed before the radically re-written mission and values have been agreed (radical as they have changed from a half screen to 2-screens worth on-wiki and several more screens of new off-wiki definitions). As the strategic plan, goals and measures are supposed to flow from the mission and values, the fact that this is still undergoing change yet the entire structure has been finalized, would seem to make it now resistant to change, as presumably both trustees and employees have invested significant time in it before unpaid non-trustee volunteers or the general membership have had a chance to look at a draft, or take part in any community discussion of priorities and goals for the future of the charity. --Fæ (talk) 23:31, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Fae as I'm sure you're aware, the difficulty of writing such documents is that the various levels are all associated and some substantial time needs to go in to the conceptual task of understanding how the bits relate and what that means for operations, etc. We did not have a 'model' before (see Strategic and operational models), and creating one requires working through the levels.

The documents have not, however, come out of a vacuum. As described in Strategic plan 2014-2019#Resources we have used we made use of Charity, Foundation, and other resources including the various earlier strategic plan drafts and the discussion around those (although they're not listed there).

Re "As the strategic plan, goals and measures are supposed to flow from the mission and values, the fact that this is still undergoing change yet the entire structure has been finalized," I don't really understand what you mean, what is still undergoing change? Do you disagree with the structure (it's a very standard model and seems to me to work well in our context)? On this (contrasting) point "community discussion of priorities and goals" we're absolutely open to suggestions and discussion. I hope we've built on the earlier work of the community (both WMUK and wider) to write something that appeals, but that's certainly not to say we won't take discussion on it. So, while to some extent a discussion about whether this is "geared to resist change" might be useful, I'd rather have a conversation about whether it needs to be changed, and if so, how. Sjgknight (talk) 08:20, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

You are asking if I disagree with a raft of documents and a new structure that has been revealed to the community as a completed bundle. This misses the point, if the board wanted to know if the members disagreed with, say, dropping the value of "free" from our Mission, or creating a strategic plan without any specific targets for being effective in delivering the outcomes (for example a target than guarantees we do not fund an operational system that spends 50% of the input funds before the remaining 50% is spent on outcomes to beneficiaries), then these are questions that should have been asked when it was under discussion, rather than put on the table as a complete body of work.

The board has allowed a 4 week window for members to read this raft of new documents and think about whether it can realistically deliver against our expectations and whether it still satisfies the mission we originally set for the charity that now appears to be being re-written in a far more complex form. I can't imagine putting in the hours needed to do that properly in February (especially as this process was not explained to members in advance) and I doubt that many members will read through everything and be able to make cogent comments, particularly considering the confusing lack of flow down/navigation between the documents, for example the Strategic plan 2014-2019 is not a strategic plan, it appears to be an introduction to the Strategic Goals and the goals are not written as goals to be delivered, so there is no sense of timeliness and they are not easily qualified in measurable terms. Certainly what no longer appears available to members is rejecting the aims or goals as too woolly and replacing them with new aims and goals that are SMART rather than just claiming to be SMART.

A case in point:

• "G3.3 Legislative and institutional changes favour the release of Open Content." This is not a goal for the charity as it is almost entirely dependent on external forces. Nor is it expressed in a deliverable form. In terms of structure, the "aim" is an apparent parent to this goal "We understand that with efficient use of technology we can significantly increase our own impact. But we want to go beyond that by supporting technical innovation more broadly to allow others in the Wikimedia movement and the Open Content sector to benefit as well" but this aim is even more vague with classic red flag terms like "increase our impact" and "supporting technical innovation" that have no underpinning measures as demonstrated by the fact that Progress on Outcomes attempts to measure the achievement of the goal by "narrative" alone. Had I and other members been invited to comment on this level of detail at the beginning we might have met the aim with specific goals such as creating case-books, targets for lobbying specific organizations, having representation on named external bodies, all of which could be measured, rather than believing that wordy reports without any hard targets are an acceptable way to spend large sums of donated funds.

--Fæ (talk) 11:22, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

The setting of SMART targets is not the only means through which charitable (or organisational) impact may be assessed. Through making use of a range of 'distance travelled', 'SMART', and narrative impact devices across a range of measures (i.e. avoiding the use of single metrics) we're trying to develop a set of output measures that actually reflect our values and vision and align with our desired outcomes. Those goals are fairly high level, precisely to give flexibility in application, and to encompass the broad range of activities in which we engage. Aims and goals should not be SMART in the sense you mean; the targets against them can be, but as I note, this is not the only means through which to assess impact. Our activities should have output targets, set against our outcomes or goals, and this is being worked on at an operational level.

The community has more than once worked on strategy yet none was agreed on. We have built on those prior efforts, and the efforts of various other organisations (including the wider third sector community) to develop this strategy which provides a framework for understanding our operations. We have made it very clear in advance that we would provide a month window in which to comment on the strategy developed.

What is utterly untenable is that we return to a position where we have no framework with which to align our work, and "SMART" targets are finger in the wind (or dart at the number chart), for example "member numbers" is an awful SMART target because it is not at all clear what it represents with regard to our outcomes, what we want is an active membership, and there might be a baseline number there below which activity cannot be sustained but aiming for ever increasing membership pays scant regard for what we're actually trying to achieve. Moreover, we cannot be in a position where basic inputs are being used to assess our outcomes - the creation of a case book is an input not an output, the impact of that case book, possibly its use, etc. is an output.

I do agree that some of the documents could do with renaming and a pagenav setup (indeed we said as much when we uploaded), but I'm at capacity.

We are more than open (we would like to actively encourage!) suggestions for alternative, additional, and methods for, the tracking of outputs (so if you don't like narrative, then feel free to make suggestions). Sjgknight (talk) 11:43, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

1. I do not understand how your reply justifies the use of narrative to provide a measurement of the delivery of a goal that the board of trustees has defined for the strategy, nor why 4 weeks is sufficient consultation with members for a changing strategy that the board had to "invest significant time" in creating but not taken the time to present or walkthrough with members who may also need to invest significant time to understand the concepts behind it, assuming that at the end of 4 weeks the documents will be considered final. Narrative is not a metric, it cannot be a key performance indicator, it is not SMART, it is not a measure of "distance travelled".
2. WRT the specific case of narrative, I already mentioned alternatives above—"we might have met the aim with specific goals such as creating case-books, targets for lobbying specific organizations, having representation on named external bodies, all of which could be measured"—these were off the top of my head, but by all means feel free use them. Considering the significant number of trustees and full time employees we have working on this, I doubt I could ever invest as much professional time as you are as a group in writing the detail and finding better forms of measuring progress against goals than effectively no verifiable measurement.
3. WRT your justification about "returning to a position where we have no framework", this was not part of the issues I have highlighted, nor a suggestion. It seems tangential.
4. With regard to "we are more than open", though this is another tangent, I have to disagree. We have yet to return to the level of openness and transparency that the charity enjoyed when it was created 3 years ago, in practice every passing year we have seen more and more of the business of the charity conducted in-camera and away from the view of unpaid non-trustee members.

Anyway, just getting this far has taken me a day's worth of volunteer time, I feel that this would take several more days to read all the documents and review the many external links, such as the WMF and the OKF sites that, according to your statements here, now appear necessary for any member to make an informed observation and to be taken seriously or to expect a meaningful change to occur without extensive lobbying for every change, including having to extensively write up the change in unpaid volunteer time, rather than justifications to keep the documents as presented by the board of trustees. I don't know if I will be able to find that much time in February on top of my "real life" and Wikimedia event commitments that I also have to spend time preparing for. --Fæ (talk) 13:12, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Process of putting this plan together

Hi all. I'm curious to know how this plan as posted has been put together. I see from the board minutes that a task force was put together consisting of all(?) board members. Was there a meeting of all trustees to assemble these documents? Were staff members or non-board community members involved in that process? I'm asking because this seems like a really good step forward, which is fantastic to see, and I'd like to understand what led to this change in approach. (And thanks to everyone that worked on this!) Mike Peel (talk) 21:45, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi Mike, happy to provide a bit of background. The draft plan so far has come largely from a concentrated series of in-person trustee meetings that we have held following the December board meeting. There have been around five or six meetings so far, most of which have been half day or whole day working sessions. Several of our trustees have specific experience in working with these types of strategic model, and in early meetings input was provided by Carol Campbell, Alastair McCapra, Kate West, Simon Knight and myself, as well as by Jon Davies. Much of the detailed work in later meetings has been done by Simon Knight and myself. Simon and I are now working closely with the staff, particularly on the alignment of the low-level activities with the Outputs/Outcomes that we are able to measure, and also to ensure that we have suitable systems in place actually to capture all of the hard data that we have committed to collect. A lot of work is ongoing to determine historic (baseline) figures to allow us to set detailed targets for the year. We are now hoping for significant external and community input, and in addition to asking our own community, here, we have sought input from the Foundation as well as from all of the chapters. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:07, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Structure

The Strategic level section says, "The plan sets out our high-level Strategic Goals, and the type of impact we aim to achieve with each of those goals (the Aims)." This is confusing, for as far as I can see, those points are set out in other documents than this one. Andreas JN 20:29, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Well spotted. Initially it was all one document which was then split. I will re-phrase. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:55, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

We badly need a navbox on each page, as it's difficult to follow the high-to-low level planning through without one, and without the context pages will not make much sense when read in isolation. Have run out of time now but will do it in the morning. At least I've managed to link everything up now. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:15, 14 February 2014 (UTC)