I know we have all seen countless examples of high quality plans, strategic documents or policies that start off with a lot of energy and goodwill from the stakeholders but ultimately lead to minimal or no change.

How can we avoid this lack of progress? Here are seven ways to design in support for implementation.

1. Detailed implementation plan: The plan itself must include timelines and responsibilities for implementation, setting a standard for what good implementation looks like. This is a necessary step to allow the next steps to happen.
2. Monitoring and evaluation: The tried and tested means is to include monitoring and evaluation as part of the plan to support accountability. A well designed evaluation plan will include process measures (e.g. number of community workshops on data literacy conducted) and outcome measures (e.g. number of community members accessing a data portal). This ensures we are doing what we said we would and achieving what we set out to achieve.
3. Independence in evaluation: Additional steps to increase the likelihood of implementation is to have the monitoring and evaluation conducted independently to the organisation tasked with implementation. This contract and associated funds should be established early in the process, while the energy for the strategy is still high. This ensures unbiased results and prevents the lack of implementation of implementation from going unnoticed.
4. Reporting requirements: Requiring formal reporting to a governance body is ideal, particularly if that body is public such as Parliament. This is important to establish in the process of developing the strategy.
5. Governance: Involve multiple voices in the process of building the plan. This will lead to a higher degree of accountability for the plan’s actions. A strategy development steering committee that includes external stakeholders vested in the outcomes can be effective.
6. Plan embedded in usual practice: Ensure the plan itself is embedded in usual practice or existing systems. This means that even if the attention to the plan wanes, the usual systems in place will ensure the plan is not forgotten. For example, include reporting requirements in an existing mandated reporting system to ensure periodic reporting against the plan. If designed optimally, the report will also be visible to people outside of the organisation. Another example is to ensure the actions required are defined in a unit’s business plan with allocated resources and roles.
7. Engage everyone in the effort: Change management is most successful when there is broad engagement. People need to understand why the change is happening, how it will benefit their work, have contributed to planned change and participate in the process of change. In the context of public health strategy where there are often multiple stakeholder, community and other agencies, this engagement needs to start at the very beginning, bringing all stakeholders along the journey with authentic collaboration.

All easy, right?