Strategic planning processes, vision and mission development, goal setting, and performance metrics. Covers stakeholder engagement and alignment with jurisdiction priorities.
2
hours
0.2
CEUs
Administrative, Legal & Management
1.7.4
Strategic planning processes, vision and mission development, goal setting, and performance metrics. Covers stakeholder engagement and alignment with jurisdiction priorities.
Format
On-Demand Online
Delivery
Self-Paced
Access
24/7 After Enrollment
Certification
Certificate of Completion
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Contact our support teamFacilitate strategic planning with department and stakeholder input
A building department that plans one budget year at a time is always reacting. Permit volume moves with the construction economy, and the department's most consequential decisions do not fit inside a single budget cycle: hiring an inspector is a multi-year commitment to salary, training, and certification; a permitting-software conversion takes longer than a fiscal year to select, fund, and absorb; a fee schedule set during a boom can quietly become inadequate in a downturn. Building Department Administration is direct about this: an agency manager must develop long-range goals and objectives, usually in the form of strategic planning, to meet the mandates the program faces. In government, long-range plans may lack the urgency they carry in private business but are no less important, and a plan's practical time span should be measured against the political environment — often the terms of the incumbent elected officials.
There is a second reason to plan: the department's standing with its governing body. Building departments compete for budget resources with police and fire, which are usually given priority, and elected officials increasingly expect agencies to do more with less. A department that can show a coherent multi-year story — workload trend, service commitment, what it needs and when — is far stronger than one that shows up each spring with a one-year wish list. The text notes that departments counter pressure toward privatization by operating transparently and demonstrating a quality system with established service goals; the strategic plan is where that demonstration lives.
Facilitating the plan is a distinct skill from writing it. The goals of a code agency are often set, at least in outline, by elected officials or senior managers; the building official translates that direction into a workable program while staying focused on the adopted codes and public safety. The text is emphatic that goal-setting should be inclusive: having senior staff, mid-level managers, and nonsupervisory employees from each control area and job level assist in defining goals creates teamwork, represents every part of the department, and gives employees ownership of the result. Inclusion does not mean staff dictate the goals — the manager weighs the needs of the program, the needs of the staff, and the direction set by governmental leaders.
Every plan should begin with a situational assessment — the benchmark against which progress will later be measured. The text's proactive-program model follows exactly this sequence: assessment and benchmarks, then legislative and management policy in the form of a strategic plan, then program initiatives, then performance measures. The assessment typically covers:
An honest assessment presented plainly converts anecdote into evidence before anyone argues about solutions — the most persuasive document a department can put in front of its council.
A building official in a growing suburb is asked by the city manager to justify a request for an additional plans examiner. Rather than answering with a one-year staffing memo, the building official convenes a planning effort: two half-day sessions with all staff, a survey of frequent applicants, and a pull of five years of permit and plan-review volume. Front counter staff surface a finding leadership had missed — much applicant frustration traces to resubmittals caused by inconsistent correction letters, not raw review speed. The assessment reframes the request into a phased staffing increase tied to projected volume plus a standardized review process. Staff at every level recognize their own input in the final plan — and the city manager receives a multi-year proposal grounded in data rather than a one-time plea.
The most common facilitation mistake is planning as a one-person exercise — the building official drafts a plan alone, staff first see it at rollout, and it changes nothing about how anyone works. The correction is structured participation from every control area and job level, which the text ties directly to ownership and teamwork. A second mistake is skipping the assessment and jumping straight to solutions; without a benchmark, the department cannot later demonstrate that anything improved. A third is treating stakeholder input as a threat — fearing contractors will lobby for lenient enforcement. Enforcement standards are not negotiable, but service delivery is exactly where outside input is most valuable. A fourth is ignoring the political calendar: a plan launched without regard to the governing body's terms and priorities may lose its sponsors before it takes hold.
Develop measurable goals and performance indicators
A strategic plan stands or falls on whether its goals can be measured. Building Department Administration describes a complete plan as comprehensive: establishing a framework for implementation, including public education, defining responsibilities, defining the level of service, and establishing measurable goals — covering current programs to maintain as well as future programs and enhancements. "Define the level of service" and "establish measurable goals" are the phrases that separate a working plan from a brochure.
Start with mission before metrics. A mission statement should say, in a sentence or two, why the department exists — protecting life safety and property in the built environment while serving the people who build in the community. The ICC's own Vision 2025 planning effort models the form: a mission distilled to a single belief statement — keeping people safe in built environments — supported by a few strategic pillars, each carrying specific initiatives. A department can follow the same architecture at local scale.
Then translate mission into service goals. The text's formulation is the backbone of this module: when service goals for permitting, plan review, and inspections are drawn up with input from stakeholders, the department's performance can be clearly measured in three distinct areas — quality (error rate), timeliness, and customer satisfaction. Effective management therefore starts with establishing service goals and training staff on the quality objectives, followed by timely measurement against the goals and open, transparent handling of shortcomings. Each leg of the triad needs its own indicator: quality through error rates found in supervisory spot-checks; timeliness through turnaround targets such as a set number of business days for a standard residential plan review; customer satisfaction through surveys or follow-up calls. "Improve customer service" becomes workable only when restated as a target with a number, a baseline, and a date.
Measure performance, not just activity. The text distinguishes input indicators — the expenditures allocated to a program (staffing, contractor labor, administrative costs, overhead) — from output indicators, which are just numbers: inspections performed, permits issued, notices sent. Most jurisdictions call these performance measures, but they are not; they say nothing about effectiveness, and goal regimes built on raw counts can create a culture that chases volume instead of results. A true performance measure answers the underlying question: is service better than at the last benchmark? Reassessing against the original baseline with the same criteria turns numbers into evidence.
Finally, give the goals a home and a structure. A practical department plan covers a three-to-five-year horizon — consistent with the ICMA budgeting guide's description of a strategic plan charting a course at least five years ahead — broken into annual objectives, each with a named owner, because a goal assigned to "the department" is assigned to no one. The plan belongs in the department's policy framework — the text's model outline for a policies-and-procedures manual includes a strategic plan section with its goals and objectives — and should specify its own review cadence, because a measurement no one is scheduled to look at will not be looked at.
A department's draft plan contains the goal "deliver excellent plan review." The building official pushes the group through the triad. Timeliness: what is our current turnaround for a standard residential submittal, and what should it be by when? Quality: what share of reviews get spot-checked, and what error rate are we finding? Customer satisfaction: what do applicants say about our correction letters? The group can answer the first question only roughly and the other two not at all — the measurement system must be built before the goal can be honest. The final plan states a turnaround target with a date, commits to supervisory spot-checks with a tracked error rate, launches a post-permit survey, and names the plan-review supervisor as owner of all three indicators, reporting quarterly.
The classic error is the unmeasurable goal — "improve," "enhance," "strengthen" — which cannot fail and therefore cannot succeed. The correction is baseline, target, date, owner. The second is confusing output with performance: celebrating inspection counts while error and resubmittal rates go unmeasured. The third is measurement without consequence — indicators tracked but never reviewed or acted on; the text's standard is timely measurement against the service goals and open, transparent handling of shortcomings. A fourth is setting targets without staff input; imposed targets are gamed or ignored, while targets staff helped set are defended by the people who must hit them.
Align building department strategy with municipal objectives
A department plan isolated from the jurisdiction's priorities and budget process is a shelf document waiting to happen. Alignment runs in two directions: the department's plan must serve the governing body's adopted objectives, and the governing body's budget process must fund the department's plan.
Ratification is the hinge. In the proactive-program model described in Building Department Administration, the legislative body's ratification of the strategic plan reflects its support for the program's goals — and, critically, lets the body define its desired level of service and overall expectations, taking ownership of what that service level costs. The text draws the budget consequence explicitly: tying the necessary expenditures to the legislative body's established goals provides a long-term structure for obtaining funding and staffing. A request framed as "this is what the service level you adopted requires" is categorically stronger than "this is what the department wants."
Strategy choices are the decisions that cannot be made well one year at a time:
Alignment with the budget cycle converts intentions into funded work. The ICMA budgeting guide for local governments describes the strategic plan as an essential precursor to multi-year financial planning: it identifies the government's vision, mission, strategic priorities, goals, and objectives; charts a course of action for at least five years; and operates as a rolling plan, updated periodically, with regular reports to the council on progress. Each initiative should therefore be costed and phased into a specific budget year. Long-lived items — vehicles, major technology systems, facility improvements — belong in the jurisdiction's capital improvement program, the multi-year plan projecting major capital outlays for roughly the next five to eight years, whose first year constitutes the capital budget; recurring costs — salaries, licenses, maintenance — stay in the operating budget request. A department that understands this machinery gets its initiatives into the right process at the right time; one that does not is perpetually surprised its software replacement "didn't make the budget."
Selling and sustaining the plan is the final discipline. The council presentation should be short and evidence-led: the assessment, the proposed service goals, the cost, and the ask. Inside the department, sustainment means the periodic review actually happens, results are visible to staff, and objectives overtaken by events are revised on the record rather than quietly abandoned — the rolling-plan model is exactly the alternative to the plan written once and shelved.
A department in a growth corridor faces climbing subdivision activity, slipping plan-review turnaround, and inspectors covering more stops per day each year. Rather than requesting relief piecemeal, the building official builds a three-year proposal inside the strategic plan. Year one: fund an e-permitting and electronic plan review system through the capital improvement program and add one combination inspector in the operating budget, both justified by the documented volume trend. Year two: add a plans examiner, timed to projected review workload and the efficiency gains expected once the new system is absorbed. Year three: reassess against the plan's benchmarks before committing further positions. The council, which adopted the plan's service goals in year one, approves each phase because every request ties to a service level it already ratified. When a regional slowdown flattens permit volume in year three, the building official brings a revision to the council — deferring the final position and keeping the plan, and the department's credibility, intact.
The first failure mode is the shelf plan — adopted with ceremony, never opened again; the corrections are structural: a standing review cadence, named owners, and progress reporting so neglect becomes visible. The second is the unratified plan, which forfeits the funding leverage ratification creates; put the plan on the council agenda and let the body define the level of service it is buying. The third is metrics nobody tracks. The fourth is misrouting money — pushing a major system purchase into a single operating-budget year instead of phasing it through the capital process. The fifth is rigidity: the plan updated on the record survives; the plan defended against reality is abandoned all at once.
This course provides professional development in strategic planning for building departments — planning processes, vision and mission development, goal setting, performance metrics, stakeholder engagement, and alignment with jurisdiction priorities. A department plans strategically because its defining decisions — staffing, technology, fees, succession — outlive any single budget year, and because sustained council support requires an evidence-led, ratified story about service levels and their cost. The working sequence: assessment and benchmarks; inclusive goal-setting across every level of the department; service goals measurable in quality, timeliness, and customer satisfaction; and a three-to-five-year rolling plan whose initiatives are costed and phased through the operating budget and the capital improvement program.