What's Inside

Section C. IntroductionI.
The Process of Strategic Planning

The MHMRA administration and Board of Trustees made the decision during Fiscal Year 2002 to undertake a substantial self-examination process that would support a much-needed reengineering of many of the components of the authority.

The MHMRA has complemented the ongoing reengineering effort by undertaking a process of strategic planning, which is a disciplined effort to generate decisions and actions that will guide the institution for the foreseeable future.

Fundamentally, the process of strategic planning is intended to focus energy, and to ensure that the administration and the staff are working toward the same goals. Indeed, a key component of the process involves setting institutional goals and developing an approach likely to achieve the goals.

The effectiveness of the strategic planning process relies on the willingness of the planners themselves to make decisions about what steps would be most useful to achieving success. The planners must recognize that some decisions and actions are more important than others.

In evaluating the organization, planners must focus on whether a particular programs is achieving its purpose, and also whether its operation contributes to the mission of the entire organization. This mission is discussed below.

MHMRA Ex. Dir. Reports 2/02; A Work In Progress.

II. Mission and Values Statements
A. Mission

It is the mission of the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County to provide or ensure the provision of services and supports that are as high quality, efficient, and cost effective as possible within the resources available, such that persons with mental disabilities may live with dignity as fully functioning, participating, and contributing members of our community, regardless of their ability to pay or third party coverage.

This means that:

• Persons with severe mental illness should be able to live in homes of their own, develop relationships, work, and remain out of hospitals and jails.
• Persons with mental retardation or developmental delays should be able to acquire the skills and access community resources to develop networks of human relationships, learn, work, and live in environments of their choosing.
• Children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances should be able to live in homes with families, develop normal relationships with their peers, attend school, and remain out of hospitals, residential, and juvenile justice facilities.

B. Vision

The vision of the MHMRA is that the public mental health and mental retardation system will act in partnership of consumers, family members, service providers and policy makers which creates options responsive to individual needs and preferences.

This vision includes recognition of these values:

• The individuals MHMRA serves share common human needs, rights, desires and strengths. MHMRA celebrates cultural diversity and individual uniqueness and is committed to support individual choices and preferences.
• MHMRA is committed to developing an environment that inspires and promotes innovation, fosters dynamic leadership and rewards creativity among our staff, volunteers, and consumers.

III. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

An analysis of an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) is a simple technique for representing information important to strategic planning. It focuses the process by breaking it down into four questions:

• What are the organization’s internal Strengths?
• What are the organization’s internal Weaknesses?
• What external Opportunities exist for the organization?
• What external Threats might hold the organization back?

Successful organizations must exploit strengths rather than merely focus on weaknesses. The positive approach should also apply to observations about opportunities and threats. However, planners must remember that if strengths are ignored, they can become weaknesses. In the same way, opportunities can become threats.

What follows summarizes perceived Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of the MHMRA of Harris County.

A. Strengths

• Infrastructure for services basically sound.
• Some customers able to direct own recovery.
• Core staff/supporters strongly committed.
• Excess volunteer capacity to be tapped.
• Dominant position of influence.
• Knowledgeable staff is flexible.
• Harris County Commissioners’ Court is supportive

B. Weaknesses

• Lack of up-to-date operational and financial data.
• Continuing stigma of the MHMR population.
• Budget depends on external actors/conditions.
• Population to serve not a matter of choice.

C. Opportunities

• Technologies and therapies improving.
• Consumer empowerment fits recovery goals.
• Pressure increases support for reinvention.
• Freedom to determine how services to be provided.

D. Threats

• Budgets are tight & may get even tighter.
• Public/private network may constrict & close during current budget crisis, thus add to MHMRA pressures.
• State reorganization of authority appears imminent.
• Unpredictability of “compassion fatigue.”
• Laws and regulations that do not recognize current treatment environments, e.g. NPC.

IV. Conclusion: MHMRA’s Current Goals

Once an organization has committed to a mission and vision (that is, once it recognizes why it exists and what it does), it must examine the current situation.

MHMRA of Harris County recently established very broad institutional goals. These can be summarized as follows:

• Ensure provision of quality, cost effective, and consumer friendly services and supports.
• Deliver services and supports within the limits of resource availability, within payor requirements and constraints.
• Ensure that MHMRA consumers may become functioning, contributing, and integrated members of society.

To achieve these general goals, MHMRA committed to refine infrastructure and internal support systems and to establish external links with providers and the community.

A. Infrastructure. To refine infrastructure, the authority set the following objectives:

• Continue to implement, refine, and restructure to prepare for contract performance evaluation process by TDMHMR.
• Continue efforts to meet or exceed TDMHMR performance targets.
• Continue to implement continuous quality improvement process.
• Continue to streamline MHMRA system to reduce costs.
• Define quality according to consumer, family, and stakeholder satisfaction.
• Evaluate services according to output, outcome, and cost criteria.
• Meet or exceed Medicaid, Medicare, and third-party usage targets.

B. Linkages. To foster linkages with the community and other providers, the authority set out the following objectives:

• Build relationships with Harris County Psychiatric Center (HCPC), Ben Taub, UT Health Science Center Hospital, Harris County Hospital District (HCHD), Baylor College of Medicine, Rusk State Hospital, and other service providers.
• Build relationships with HCPC, HCHD, Richmond State School, and other mental retardation service providers.
• Urge that Planning Advisory Committees (PACs) develop and refine service delivery mechanisms to reflect community needs.
• Urge that the Network Advisory Committee (NAC) establish criteria for “best value” in services and supports.
• Progress toward equalization of MHMRA state funding.
• Seek new resources to enhance child and juvenile services.
• Seek opportunities to enhance relationships with county and city institutions.

Although a concise statement of the authority’s mission, the preceding list of goals is too general to support the strategic planning process. The terms of discussion must be better established. Upon accepting the first goal, for example, the question remains, how will one gauge service quality, cost effectiveness, and consumer friendliness?

In addition to the above, the effort to develop this strategic plan was also named as an institutional objective. The next section of this plan will begin to fulfill this objective.