Design Story · Craft & range

Agency Strategic Plan

Treasury’s five-year Strategic Plan, which covers the entire 88,000-person agency, was not a useful tool for its 88,000 civil servants. We re-designed everything about the Plan — including the strategic objectives it defined, the communications plan, and the printed report — to put its audience first. The award-winning “workbook” approach reached many more people and helped the entire agency.

View the finished plan (PDF)

+78%Increase in plan usage
88,000Civil servants reached
Cover of Treasury's 2018–2022 Strategic Plan: a diagonal photo collage of the department's work over a navy field, headed 'TREASURY — Strategic Plan 2018–2022'.
Treasury Strategic Plan 2018–2022 — the “workbook” cover.

The Goal

Transform the Strategic Plan into a tool that met the needs of Treasury’s people — to learn about the strategic goals of the organization, to make the connection between themselves and the broader organization, and to make decisions that aligned to the organization’s overall strategy. Design thinking was used throughout the process to make the results far more useful and engaging than previous plans.

Feedback

As part of the planning process, the Core Team conducted dozens of interviews across many disciplines and a comprehensive environmental scan of Treasury’s environment. The resulting SWOT analysis was incorporated into the plan, and that feedback played a critical role in developing goals and strategic objectives. The Plan, the communications plan, and supporting materials all went through several rounds of feedback — often changing significantly based on stakeholder input.

Inside the workbook

A workbook spread aligning each of Treasury's organizations to its strategic objectives in a large matrix.
Every office, mapped to the objectives
An interior spread titled 'Strong Economic Fundamentals', pairing a plain-language explanation with supporting charts.
Plain language, paired with the data
The plan's SWOT analysis laid out as a four-quadrant grid of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The SWOT, built into the plan