Another online regional program on strategic planning hosted via Zoom was successfully organized by the Colombo Plan Staff College from November 23-27, 2020. It involved a total of 52 participants from all over the Asia Pacific region specifically from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka.
The five-day proram elaborated on strategic management as a process for setting both long-term and short-term strategic directions for the organization. It was organized with a realization that a central thrust of these exercises is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage since strategic management is the process of ‘strategic decision making’. It is expected that by learning the process of strategic planning and management, a systematic way of carrying the interrelated activities is undertaken to obtain desired goals and objectives of particular institutions.
The program was supervised by Dr. Ramhari Lamichhane, CPSC Director General and was coordinated by Engr. Sanyog Bhattarai, CPSC Faculty Specialist. Mr. Rae Emmanuel Echaveria, RPID Officer and Engr. Abdul Ghani Rajput, CPSC Faculty Specialist, were also invited to the program as resource speakers.
During the five-day exercise, the participants were able to formulate their institution’s vision, mission, goals, objectives, strategies and activities based from the modules and samples presented by the speakers. They were able to practice in creating a monitoring logical framework (or logframe), action plans on the development or revision of strategic plan and a sample digital M &E tool to monitor & to evaluate strategic plans. These outputs of the program were deemed as necessary tools for the participants to prepare themselves from the different challenges and new experiences on learning brought about by the ongoing pandemic on Covid-19 which has, to date, triggered a widespread shutdown of schools and training facilities all over the world.