Strategic Alignment and Collaboration Initiative Services

The Vendor is required to provide strategic alignment and collaboration initiative services for include:
1. Project initiation, data and consultant engagement
• Facilitate establishment of the administrative working group (AWG) and confirm project governance;
• Conduct initial interviews and key staff from all four participating municipalities;
• Collect and review foundational documents including ICFS, IDPS, service agreements, financial trend data, and demographic information;
• Produce a baseline municipal and regional context brief summarizing: demographic trends; assessment and taxation pressures; service delivery and cost challenges; recent governance tensions (notably around shared services); and regional interdependencies and gaps in strategic alignment.
2. Governance and strategic capacity building
• Council roles, authorities, and decision-making responsibilities;
• Strategic governance versus operational oversight;
• Accountability and reporting structures in a shared-service environment;
• Understanding complexity: interdependencies among services, boards, and municipalities;
• (staffing, budget, and time) limits or enables strategic action;
• Develop capacity-aligned strategic priorities and avoid unachievable "laundry list" plans.
3. Strategic planning foundations
• A concise region-wide environmental scan;
• A streamlined SWOC (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges) assessment;
• A pestle (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental) analysis;
• Identification of external and internal risks;
• Discussion of the region's strategic landscape and implications for each municipality.
4. Individual municipal strategic planning
• Review of municipality-specific data from the regional context brief;
• Facilitated planning sessions with council and administration;
• Identification of 2–5 achievable, capacity-aligned strategic priorities;
• Clarification of the capacity, resources, and governance implications of each priority;
• Establishment of early indicators or simple measures of progress.
5. Regional alignment and shared priorities
• Allow each municipality to present and discuss its draft strategic priorities;
• Identify overlaps, conflicts, and complementarities across municipal plans;
• Explore opportunities for joint advocacy, shared problem-solving, or coordinated action;
• Determine where regional collaboration is feasible and where municipal autonomy must be preserved;
• Establish principles for future shared decision-making.
6. Final deliverables and implementation tools
• The consultant will produce a cohesive final package including all deliverables.
• The consultant will also provide recommendations for how councils integrate the plans into budgeting, staff work plans, and regional discussions to ensure plans do not remain unused following project completion.