The goal isn't to have improvement plans. The goal is to improve your organization by completing improvement plans. And to be completed, the improvement plans must guide the work—they must be central, not peripheral.
 
Question: To what extent do improvement plans guide staff work? (Here’s a perceptive response I received from a friend who serves as a school administrator and who rightly notes that the more staff have ownership of improvement plans, the more likely it is that staff will use improvement plans to guide their work: "Go for it, but I think the first essential question is ‘To what extent has your staff been involved in developing the improvement plans themselves?’ followed by ‘To what extent does the staff own the improvement plans they are expected to implement?,’ implicit in that being ‘If the administration dropped off the planet, would the plans still get implemented?’ Then you have a plan!")
 
To get an idea of the extent to which improvement plans guide your organization’s work, take the following assessment. Rate each item, using the following scale:

4: Consistently • 3: Usually • 2: Sometimes • 1: Rarely

___ Staff understand the improvement plans.
___ Staff know which improvement plans they are to implement.
___ Staff can explain their role in a given improvement plan.
___ Staff implement the improvement plans.

___ Improvement plans guide staff work.

3 questions:

1. To what extent do you want improvement plans to guide staff work?
2. How can you help staff use improvement plans to guide staff work?
3. What are you going to do?

Bottom line: Pursue excellence. Use your improvement plans to guide staff work. Today.