Strategic Mapping

One of the key responsibilities of the Strategic Projects team is to maintain a strategic overview of Economic Development (ED) and to look for opportunities for collaboration. This involves ensuring that the work of the division is supporting the actions laid out in our Economic Strategy and the commitments of the Council's Strategic Plan. Over the past year, several mapping exercises have been conducted by colleagues within the Strategic Projects team in order to analyse various strategies and identify potential gaps, areas of alignment and future opportunities.

To ensure we meet our strategic goals, we want to work smarter, better and more collaboratively. The strategic mapping exercise helps us understand how we can do this. This work has been primarily developed using an online workspace, which allows contributions to the project to be more creative, collaborative and design focused. There have been three primary strategic mapping projects carried out by the team:

1. Firstly, when the Council Strategic Plan was approved in October 2022, the team were tasked with aligning the commitments laid out in the Plan with our Economic Strategy. This involved utilising a model developed by colleagues within the Centre for Civic Innovation (CCI) to map out all the commitments relevant to Economic Development.

2. The team were then tasked with focusing on the GERG executive Action Plan to evaluate which out of the 20 actions set out in the plan were in line with the Economic Strategy actions. This was to highlight whether the aims of the Plan were being achieved through work undertaken by the division for the Economic Strategy.

3. Finally, the most recent piece of work that the team have carried out within the strategic mapping realm has been that of the Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF) projects. With the new addition of an SPF Manager to the division, clarity was sought around all the SPF projects; how they support our economic strategy, the levels of funding they are drawing and how they link to the Council Strategic Plan. In order to do so, after trialling various visuals, we settled on a chart of circles to display the ecosystem of each project.