Once a policy is formulated, it requires to be widely disseminated amongst all stakeholders and other associates of the project. Selection of activities and formulation of a strategic plan are usually the responsibility of the executives of the programme, and are executed with the approval of the governance. Many organisations repeat the same set of activities year after year, without targets or defined outcomes. As a result, their annual reports also contain repetitious descriptions of activities, without any indication of how effective these activities were. Some other organisations usually enumerate their activities with quantitative measures of coverage, in the belief that they can represent outcomes and impact.
Most organisations continue to face difficulties in defining outcomes and indicators of impact.
However, without these measures, it is impossible to know if a programme has been genuinely successful. Individual activities of a strategic plan are short term components of a programme, usually planned for a calendar year or a financial year. In order to monitor a programme easily, the activities need to be defined precisely, with well defined, quantitative targets for achievement for each activity in a unit time. The expected outcomes, the indicators to measure the outcomes and the resultant impact are also required to be defined clearly. Although some effort is required to develop a detailed strategic plan with well defined activities, targets, expected outcomes and their indicators, such a process can be of great benefit to the programme in many ways.