Social Services Planning: Strategies and Implementation

Social Planning Perspectives

3.1 Planning Perspectives

1. The need for social planning.
2. The inescapable auxiliary.
3. The complementary productive.
4. Social planning and investment planning as instruments for social control.

3.2 Planning Traditions

1. Planning and social reform.
2. Planning as social mobilization has its sources in anarchist, utopian, and Marxist thought.
3. Policy planning.
4. Social planning and analysis.
5. Planning as social learning. On the conservative side, concepts were adopted by theorists.
6. A second line of a revolutionary spirit in which Dewey's influence, a more indirect source, ends up in the tradition of social mobilization.

The state's commitment to correcting social imbalances, with equal opportunities and social justice, will imply the need for social planning: setting goals and social objectives and articulating means to achieve them.

3.3 Planning Cycle

Planning is a cycle that includes:

1. The formulation of objectives.
2. Situational awareness of the fact.
3. The inventory of available resources.
4. The formulation of rational strategies to allocate resources more efficiently and appropriately in order to achieve the proposed objectives.

Planning of Social Services

The quest for improved quality of social services has driven planning in all countries of our environment. In Spain, the importance of planning increases for several reasons:

• First, the recent development of social services, which are still insufficient. Planning offers a tool to employ resources appropriately in those sectors which recorded higher deficiencies.
• Second, the diversity of governments who have spoken or are intervening in the provision of social services.
• Third, the scarcity of resources, which requires setting priorities and phases of action.
• Fourth, the impact of the economic crisis.
• Finally, planning is necessary in our country for another reason: social services are not only recent but often have been introduced by political expediency or as a result of popular pressure for political transition.

Operational Planning

4.1 Operational Planning

The operational plan will follow these steps:

1. Define the problem to consider so that you can bring it to a plan or program.
2. Analyze the situation for the purpose of intervention with specific policy instruments, institutional innovations, or methods of social mobilization.
3. Design potential solutions expressed in terms of:
   • a) Future targets and specifications.
   • b) Space.
   • c) Required resources.
   • d) Implementation procedures.
   • e) Procedures for feedback and evaluation.
4. Carry out a detailed evaluation of proposed alternative solutions, technical feasibility, economic development programs, and mediation of the impact.

These activities appear as a monitoring scheme required in any planning process.

Priorities for Action in Social Services Planning

4.2 Priorities for Action in Social Services Planning

• The planning of social services is an important part of development planning.
• Greater involvement of various stakeholders in the planning will lead to greater security of success.
• This participation will increase if you decentralize decision-making and create institutional channels for people to get involved in managing the problems.
• It is necessary to create a coordinated system of State Social Services.

Planning within the social services involves the realization of more and more specific goals, which is advanced from a long-term planning linked to the guidelines of the current policy.

Once we establish a diagnosis of those needs that will be addressed, future scenarios are developed for social service delivery to citizens in need.

Medium-term plans are governed by a higher level of specificity in stages by setting targets and linking to them specific resource distribution. Such plans tend to arise with a duration between three and five years.

Short-term plans also have an operational nature, responding in most cases to new situations or particularly urgent matters.