Develop a strategic plan for a department or division within a healthcare organization, taking a balanced scorecard approach.The landscape of healthcare in the United States is constantly in the process of redesign. Nurse executives are at the forefront of change using their skills of strategic planning. To be an integral partner in healthcare redesign, nurse leaders must be able to leverage political power and data in strategic planning. Analytical tools, such as the balanced scorecard and SWOT analysis, are used to construct a solid, defensible strategic plan.
This assessment provides an opportunity for you to develop both the knowledge and skills required for strategic planning, using a balanced scorecard approach. With insight into the importance of an organization’s political landscape and a comprehensive understanding of the priorities of the organization you are studying, you are well-prepared to develop a strategic plan for a department or division within that organization.
For this assessment, remember to use the same healthcare setting you chose in the previous assessment.
Note: The assessments in this course must be completed in the order presented; subsequent assessments should be built on both your earlier work and your faculty’s feedback on earlier assessments. If you choose to submit assessments prematurely, without considering and integrating faculty feedback, your assessment may be returned ungraded, resulting in your loss of an assessment attempt.
Note: For Flexpath learners, if you choose to make revisions based on feedback from a previous attempt, you should highlight your revisions in yellow. For example, if you made revisions from attempt one and would like faculty to review the content when grading attempt two, the content needs to be highlighted. Therefore, faculty reviews only the content highlighted on attempts two and three. If the entire paper is highlighted, the paper will be returned ungraded and will count as an attempt. Track changes are not a substitution for highlighted text.
Before you get started, please watch the following video:
Develop a strategic plan that establishes top priorities for a department or division, aligned with the organization’s strategic plan, which you appraised in Assessment 1. Include the following elements in your plan:
- A balanced scorecard for the department or division. The following interactive media may help you in constructing your balanced scorecard.
- A Balanced Scorecard for Change.
- A minimum of four departmental strategic priorities, one from each balanced scorecard domain (financial, customer, internal processes, learning and growth).
- Graphical representations showing alignments between the departmental strategic priorities and the organization’s strategic plan.
- Analyze formal and informal power structures in an organization.
Strategic Plan Format and Length
Format your document using APA style.
- Length: Your strategic plan should be 5–7 pages in length, excluding the title page and references page.
- APA Format: Use the APA Style Paper Tutorial [DOCX] to help you in writing and formatting your analysis. Be sure to include:
- A title page and references page.
- An abstract and running head are not required.
- Appropriate section headings.
- Additional Information: In addition to an introduction with thesis statement and a conclusion, use the following section headings to format the body of your paper to ensure thorough content coverage and flow.
- Departmental Strategic Priorities.
- Effects of Organizational Policies.
- Alignment of Departmental Strategic Priorities.
- Department Balanced Score Card.
- Formal and Informal Lines of Power.
- Add your balanced scorecard and graphical representations of priority alignments as appendices.
- Include the scorecard as an APA properly formatted appendix.
- Nomenclature: Please save the document you are submitting for grading using the following format.
- Lastname, First name – Assessment 2 Attempt #
Evaluation
The following tasks correspond to the grading criteria in the assessment rubric, so be sure to address each point. Read the performance-level descriptions for each criterion to see how your work will be assessed.
- Determine departmental strategic priorities.
- Include one strategic priority for each balanced scorecard domain (financial, customer, internal processes, learning and growth) for a total of four strategic priorities.
- Write 1–2 paragraphs on each of the identified strategic priorities.
- Why are these priorities important? Provide justification on importance.
- Are these priorities feasible for a quality improvement project?
- For example, do they reflect departmental objectives, available resources, and a specific time frame?
- Explain.
- Evaluate the effects of organizational policies on departmental strategic priorities.
- How do existing policies hinder or facilitate what you hope to accomplish?
- Align departmental strategic priorities with elements of an organization’s strategic plan.
- Represent the alignments graphically in a crosswalk table, Venn diagram, or any other format that clearly illustrates the alignments.
- Include your graphical representation of the alignments as an APA properly formatted appendix.
- Discuss the graphical representation of the alignments in the body of your paper with references to appendix.
- Create a balanced scorecard for a department or division.
- Each scorecard domain must include an objective, performance metric, benchmark target, and prospective initiative.
- Submit your balanced scorecard as an APA properly formatted appendix.
- Discuss the balanced scorecard in the body of your paper with references to appendix.
- Analyze the formal and informal lines of power within the organization.
- Describe the informal and formal lines of power within this organization.
- What source of power is being used by the different stakeholders? For example: authority, rewards, coercion, expertise, reputation, and personal power.
- Describe the effects of power structures on organizational culture, policies, and communications at all levels.
- Communicate clearly and concisely in a form and style appropriate for the audience and for the substance, purpose, and context of the message being conveyed.
- Consider the needs of your audience.
- Be succinct and mindful of communication best practices.
- Carefully review your materials to avoid errors that could distract the audience and make it more difficult for them to focus on the substance of your strategic plan.
- Apply APA formatting to in-text citations, references, and appendices.
- APA formatted citations and references for a minimum of six scholarly references.