SWOT

Seeking Sunshine in Pocomoke objective:
Exploration of municipal best practices by all persons interested in improving Pocomoke City governance. All views are welcome.

How do we go about doing this? How do we, the Pocomoke citizenry, work toward improving Pocomoke City governance?

Be forewarned, I am about to be a bit of a school marm here.

I have had the privilege of working for a boss that makes very effective use of strategic planning. For more than ten years I was the Director of Administrative Services for the Worcester County Health Department. I was part of the management team at the health department and we routinely used strategic management tools. My boss was the Health Officer.

For any organization to be progressive, effective strategic planning is needed. For this planning to be effective, the current situation, or environment, needs to be analyzed. You cannot just look at the positives. You have to consider the negatives. You cannot fix problems unless you acknowledge them and assess them. With the world changing as fast as it does now if an organization isn’t striving to be progressive, that organization is not maintaining status quo; it is moving backward.

I want to introduce you to the strategic planning tool know as SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Strengths and Weaknesses are the positive and negative internal factors that need consideration to do strategic planning.

Opportunities and Threats are the positive and negative external factors.

In my next posts I want us to start using SWOT. I need the help of all Pocomoke citizens to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Pocomoke City and its government. We will start with strengths.

Hopefully I have not turned you all off now.