NOAA Office of Program Planning and Integration

4.0 – Strategic Planning

The strategic planning process establishes the agency’s mission, vision and long-term goals, and short-term objectives and strategies, allowing NOAA’s management to make reasoned investment choices and the American people to monitor NOAA’s performance. Strategic planning accounts for long-term economic, technological, and environmental trends and challenges that will shape the agency’s future over the next 25 years. These expectations are then communicated internally to NOAA employees and externally to NOAA’s partners and stakeholders. NOAA’s strategic planning efforts set the course for the agency.

Strategy explains, at the highest level, what the agency intends to do and why it intends to do it. It relates a mission statement (with a corresponding set of functions) to a vision statement (with a corresponding set of long-term strategic goals) to succinctly convey NOAA’s fundamental purpose, strategic direction, and value to society. In the simplest form, a strategic plan identifies what NOAA should produce in the future (i.e., outputs, activities, targets), and why those are important. Distinguishing between outcomes and outputs gives flexibility to change agency activities while staying true to its overall purpose.

NOAA’s strategic goals are outcome-oriented—that is, they specify future conditions that the agency is committed to achieving, and how society will benefit from NOAA’s success. Three key terms relate to outcomes:

»VISION describes an envisioned future state of society and the environment that, implicitly, cannot be achieved without NOAA. The vision describes long-term success in terms of the value that NOAA will generate for society—in effect, why the agency exists. The timeframe for NOAA’s vision is 25 years (i.e., through the year 2035).

»GOALS specify the components of NOAA’s vision for 2035, translating the vision into a limited number of high-level results that NOAA will seek to achieve. Collectively, NOAA’s goals encompass all agency investments and thus, are the foremost programmatic rationale for budget requests. The timeframe for NOAA’s strategic goals is also 25 years.

»OBJECTIVES For each of its long-term goals and enterprises, NOAA specifies a corresponding set of near-term (five-year) objectives that represent concrete, measurable steps toward that result. Objectives further describe each goal or enterprise statement by detailing the societal and environmental benefits that NOAA seeks to achieve in the short-term. The objectives within a goal or enterprise may or may not be comprehensive of agency activities toward that result.

In particular instances, outcomes at every level (vision, goal, and objective) should be derived from an understanding of national and international trends, and should respond to evolving challenges to and opportunities for the Nation and the international community. Goals and objectives should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART).

NOAA achieves its outcomes through the outputs it produces (e.g., goods and services).

Three key terms relate to outputs:

»MISSION summarizes the agency’s fundamental mandates and responsibilities. It is a succinct and distinctive statement of what NOAA does. The mission statement encapsulates the set of statutory requirements that drive NOAA’s mission functions, and is assumed to be stable over the planning period.

»FUNCTIONS are required to execute the mission, consistent with the NOAA Functional Model. NOAA’s functions are the highest-level categorization of NOAA’s capabilities and are comprehensive—that is, all activities conducted by NOAA can be traced to a function. In this manner, all contributors to NOAA’s mission can see how their activities support the plan.

»CAPABILITIES are the tangible and intangible skills and assets that NOAA uses to generate outputs. NOAA’s capabilities represent what is needed to achieve NOAA’s short-term (five-year) objectives. The capabilities described within any function may or may not encompass all possible capabilities within that function.

Agency strategy requires decisions about what an agency will do and what it will not do. Specific targets communicate agency strategy, and distinguish what is a priority from that which is not.