Background
In 2018, the Brooklyn Park City Council authorized the Fire Department to launch a strategic planning initiative. Strategic planning is an intentional process by which an agency or organization surveys the industry trends: the customer’s needs and wants; the current and future available resources; and the current and future capabilities of the agency to determine performance gaps.
A team of thirty-two members of the Brooklyn Park Fire Department and external stakeholders from the community met for a two-day planning process in March, 2018. The stakeholders were tasked with providing input and feedback throughout the planning process as advocates from the sub-groups they were asked to represent.
Key themes
At the conclusion of the process, the stakeholders derived three key themes:
- How do we continue to improve on saving lives during emergency events?
- How do we meet the increasing service demands over the coming years?
- How do we better market our services and demonstrate our value to our community?
From these key themes, members of the agency’s command staff developed a list of nine strategic objectives, 21 outcome measurements and 31 supporting goals to prepare the Brooklyn Park Fire Department to meet the needs and expectations of their community and remain a “value-added” organization into the future.
While the consultant worked to finalize the strategic plan, the Fire Chief and members of the Fire Department’s leadership team began work on an 18-month operational plan based on the strategic objectives, outcome measurements, and supporting goals in the draft strategic plan. The final version of the strategic plan was presented to the City Council on May 28, 2019, as well as the 18-month operational plan.