Development Plans

Once you have completed the organisational assessment, you should be more aware of both your organisation’s strengths (the areas where your organisation has high scores) and organisational development needs (the areas where your organisation has lower scores).

The next steps are to:

1. Identify up to four organisational development priorities
2. Plan how to strengthen your organisation in these priority areas
3. Identify indicators to assess your progress

Step 1. Identify priorities

To identify which of your organisation’s development needs are priorities, we suggest that you have a discussion within your organisation thinking about the following questions:

• Which areas are most critical to the success of your organisation?
• Are any of the identified needs an underlying cause of other needs?
• Where is there greater potential for change in the organisation?
• Do any of the identified needs make it difficult to meet important stakeholder requirements?
• Are there any improvements that could be achieved quickly or relatively easily? Working on these can give confidence to those involved and signal to others in the organisation that change is achievable and leads to tangible benefits. 
• Are additional tools needed to make the required changes?

Discussing the root causes and consequences of each organisational development need can also help in the prioritisation process, as well as help identify potential actions to address these needs.

Once you have decided on four priorities you are ready to plan to strengthen your organisation in these priority areas.

Step 2. Plan to strengthen your organisation in your priority areas

Once you have identified up to four priority areas for development you need to think about what actions you need to take to strengthen these organisational areas.

Ideally, your plan will incorporate a range of capacity building strategies, tools and activities that reinforce each other. Try to propose changes that can be achieved quickly or relatively easily as well as those that will take longer to achieve. Some actions may require additional tools (i.e. staff time, equipment, external facilitators or expertise), but by including these you can then also identify ways of resourcing these actions and include these in your plan also.

Download the Organisational Development Planning Guide and Template to help you create your plan! The plan you create using the template below will be visible to the whole organisation.

Once complete, ensure this plan is incorporated into annual operational planning and budgeting, and into individual workplans.

Step 3. Identify indicators to monitor progress in your priority areas

Next you need to think about what measures you can use to monitor your progress. For suggestions, check out our list of suggested indicators. In addition, you may also wish to repeat the organisational assessment periodically in order to help assess changes in your organisational capacity.

If you don't have a Organisational Development Plan you can download a plan template below.

Or logon/register to access and complete an online version

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Download the Organisational
Development Planning Guide