Municipalities: Strategic Directions for Improved Priorities Management

For improved performance, your municipality must align its strategy with its objectives, reflecting current issues.

In a context of major transformations, including the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), your strategy must be carefully considered.

Municipalities are recognized as the government of proximity with a role that goes beyond managing infrastructure and urban planning to encompass increased economic, social and cultural development and safeguarding and developing natural spaces. Additionally, they must often deal with an increasing number of stakeholders with diverse expectations.

Added to this is a rapidly changing context: demographic pressures, economic uncertainties, climate change, and increased use of AI, among other factors. AI is not just a technology: it profoundly influences the municipal environment and opens the door to new opportunities. Ignoring its impacts would be to underestimate a major strategic lever. It must therefore be part of strategic thinking as a structuring factor in long-term orientations and choices.

With a wide range of potential activities and limited financial manoeuvrability, elected officials must regularly decide between projects that are equally important but difficult to compare. How can they approach this process?

Strategic directions: the basis for effective management

Strategic directions are the result of a structured, or strategic, four-step planning process:

1. Analyze the internal and external environment

The first step consists in analyzing the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and the external environment’s opportunities and threats. These analyses will reveal uncover the major issues facing the municipality in the coming years.

AI must be part of the assessment because it influences all aspects of municipal management. It offers many possibilities for addressing the issues identified. By incorporating it into your thinking from the analysis stage onwards, you will be able to anticipate its impacts and position the municipality to seize opportunities and meet future challenges.

2. Consult citizens

The elected officials will then have the requisite information to consult citizens about their concerns and vision of the municipality’s future. These consultations must be mobilizing and serve as a catalyst to define a common vision.

3. Adopt a clear vision

In this evolving context, the vision adopted by elected officials and citizens becomes a powerful tool for mobilization and guides the organization toward long-term goals. To be effective, it must be simple, ambitious yet realistic, inspiring yet concrete.

4. Define strategic directions

These will be the starting point for determining priorities.

Strategic directions guide the short- and medium-term deployment of actions to address the issues, establish major projects and communicate the municipal council’s priority intentions. They channel municipal action towards activities that will be the municipality’s focus in the next three to five years.

Since AI is set to transform the way municipalities are run, territories are managed, and citizens are served, the guidelines should not only reflect its impact, but also integrate it as a cross-cutting strategic lever.

Relying on clear strategic directions is particularly important when considering their positive impact on organizational performance. Because they align the long-term vision with the implementation of strategies and operational plans, they ensure consistency between the municipal council’s wishes and organizational capacity and the various components of the municipality’s activities.

The municipality plays a very pivotal role during the budget process when the municipal council must decide among the various projects presented to it. Strategic directions then serve as a framework for the annual resource allocation decisions.

This article was updated with the collaboration of Clara Mirol, Director of Management Consulting at Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton.