New Year, Old Resolutions: Revisiting Our DCS Strategic Plan

This year, our January started off BUSY. We welcomed our new intern, Isabel Lam (more on her here!). Our Social Media Strategist Darya Kharabi hit their one-year workiversary with DCS. And even our Spain-based Chief Strategy Officer Charlie Lotz was back in town (we kept insisting that Seville simply can’t compete with mid-winter Pittsburgh until we broke him).

But even as Charlie was visiting, we were REvisiting one of the cornerstones of how Denny Civic Solutions operates: our 2021-24 Strategic Plan. 

So now that we’re officially halfway through that four-year Plan, what have we learned?

1. We couldn’t have done this alone. Back in late 2020, we brought in strategic advising superstar Laurie Barkman at SmallDotBig to guide us through the strategic planning process. While we’ve always prided ourselves on delivering for our clients, DCS was at a point where we needed to carve out time to apply the same level of strategic thinking and scrutiny to our own business operations. Laurie helped us think through the steps needed to help us improve, expand, and plan for the future of our company.

2. Your vision, mission, and values MATTER*. Laurie helped us distill and put into plain words what Denny Civic Solutions, as an organization, is all about. The result? 

• Our new vision statement: To make change for the common good. 

• Our new mission statement: To elevate and advance our clients’ causes through the right connections, strategic collaborations, and smart advocacy, so that together we can achieve great things in our communities.

• Our new values: Learning, Fairness, Listening, Collaboration, Commitment, Adaptiveness, and Fun.

3. We’re not perfect. While we’ve hit a whole bunch of our milestones laid out in the strategic plan, we’ve whiffed on some others. This month’s Strategic Plan revisit helped us focus in on what to cut, what to add, and where we need to get back on track.

4. Strategic Planning is worth it. While it can be a daunting prospect to carve out the time necessary to engage in a thoughtful, sustained Strategic Planning process, it’s worth it. Two years in, we’ve improved our internal processes, developed a range of new services, and gotten more efficient at delivering wins for our clients.

5. There’s more to do. A Strategic Planning process is just that – a process. It requires check-ins, maintenance, and (once we hit the end of 2024) an honest re-evaluation of how to continue moving forward. 

Bonus lesson: the post-strategic planning dinner is almost as important as the planning itself! Here’s the team at Soju.

*Keep an eye out in early February for a piece digging further into just how we’ve put our vision, mission, and values into practice in the two+ years since. Suffice to say they’ve made a world of difference in how we operate, what we prioritize – and which projects we do (and don’t) take on.