Retreat!

Ok so I realize I didnt' do a post on the retreat on 10/23 and that was in part because of my VA schedule being so thrown off lately that I was starting to burn out on things. Basically I had the retreat on Fri 10/23, then was back at the VA the following Tuesday 10/26 and Wed 10/27 doing the poster and then spent the rest of the week finalizing the HCHV strategic plan that I would be turning in for my class. It's not necessarily the HCHV strategic plan that will be adopted by the dept. at this point for a few reasons.

The retrat itself was good. It was nice to get away into a different location with all 12 staff and sit down and talk. We learned some new things about each other. And some people had a chance to get some things off their chests they needed to. Overall that was good. We started with a guest speaker who did a presentation on group communications and group cycles. Perhaps just because I am still in school and just did all that last year in my intro to groups class, I felt this info was kind of redundant to be presented to a group where 10 out of the 12 were social workers. The presenter was a staff psychologist who does team trainings. I personally thought we'd be better served with more trust building exercises but there were some positive responses from some of our staff who seemed to need that refresher on storming norming performing. So from the team's perspective, it was probably a good thing.

The afternoon was spent almost exclusively on SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). We did SWOT exhaustively. Almost too much so because there's a lot of things we cannot control being a govt agency who get budget assigned by Central Office and cannot accept donations or get grants. Also Central Office determines what programs we do. So there's little wiggle room. Weaknesses like, we don't have cell phones for our outreach staff, cannot be fixed by us -- but only on the station level. I would like to have really pushed things into the next step which is determining and setting priorities for the next few years. We didn't get to that and really, that is what a strategic plan is. The VA tends to have that issue -- they think a good thorough SWOT = a strategic plan. Based on our text and class discussions, the SWOT is really an attachment for reference to the actual plan. If you don't take that next step, and decide ok, this is where we are, here's how we are going into the future, you're not doing strategic planning.

So when it got down to writing my strategic plan, I picked what I would work on, what goals and objectives I would set if I were in charge. I'll take this as a "rough draft" to the director and between the 2 of use we'll figure out the real ones. But due to time constraints with the paper being due on 10/31 and needing to get the poster done last week instead of further working on the strategic plan, I had to go with just making up the goals and objectives based on what looked appropriate from the materials gathered at the retreat. In the coming weeks I'll meet with our director and we'll get the next steps done and revise my "skeleton" plan and make it their own.

This week I am doing field from home. My field instructor will be in DC at the summit and I have some things I am working on for the VISN director that I can do from home. I'm reworking an exisitng station-level hchv newsletter to create a visn level newsletter and then she and I will work on a marketing plan over the next few weeks. What this means to me is not having to get up at the crack of dawn to be on the road at 630am 2 days this week. Without the 1.25 hr drive each way I feel almost like I'll be on vacation. This is quite well-timed because everything has been so time-pressive. So a week to take some time, play with some desktop publishing and then go back next week refreshed for the station-level strategic planning retreat on 11/9 & 11/10.