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Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 7: Strategy Implementation
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Tools: The template document does not provide any guide for this task. See resources in Appendix A
for tools to support the implementation of this task.
Related Tasks: This requires an initial list of requirements, produced from the Initiative
development task.
Comments: Varying degree of formality can be employed in the definition of the prioritization
framework. For projects involving high level of cost and risks, there must be a rational basis for
deciding on the priorities. It must also be noted for the eventual implementation of the initiatives
sound business cases must be established for them. The involvement of stakeholders in the validation
steps is essential to obtain support for the initiatives during execution. A very important consideration
in the prioritization of initiatives is the availability of resources and specifically budgets for initiatives.
It would be more pragmatic to focus on initiatives with ready budget and other resources than those
requiring substantial proposal for securing requisite resources.
7.3 Summary
This section shows how the initiatives are developed from first priority objectives and later prioritized
based on agreed prioritization framework. These two tasks are often considered outside the scope of a
strategic planning process. There are arguments that a comprehensive implementation plan should be
developed as a separate project outside the planning activity. However, even in cases where the
development of the initiatives list has been done by the strategy team, the implementation team could
use the outcomes as input for their own processes. There are growing pressures in linking resource
allocation to performance in the public administration. Without an alignment of the budgetary and
performance system, good innovations could be denied required resources due to the prevalent budget
arrangement. Therefore, there is a need for an organizational intervention to ensure that initiatives are
fairly considered largely on merit or performance history.
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao