Strategic Planning 101: Step 1

I think that a subtitle to this post could be "One more thing they didn't teach me in Library School". Or, perhaps I should have been paying better attention during my management class.

Strategic Planning is neither fun nor easy (or, if it s fun, said fun is masked by the difficulty of planning). One needs only to read the hundreds of strategic plans developed by a myriad of academic and public libraries to determine that there are hundreds of different ways to approach strategic planning.

I started out this venture in an attempt to create a Student Learning Outcomes plan for our Information Literacy Instruction That, however, transitioned into a much broader Outcomes plan for the library. There is not much written about Outcomes-based planning/assessment for the whole library. I've decided that plans that mention "challenges" or "goals" are really talking about outcomes (although, only to a point - some of the goals are really actually outputs).

Some critical questions currently lay at my feet:
1) How can we write this as a team without substantially eating away at your campus-work time (instruction, weeding, cataloging, reference, etc. etc. etc.)
2) Where does one begin? We have quite a bit of content for an environmental scan (stats, LibQual results, etc.) but we've never really talked about a vision or "goals" (outcomes).
3) Am I overanalyzing this? Are we better off approaching this from a needs-based perspective, as we have been for the past two years? We've needed better communication - we developed a blog - now we have better communication. I just don't think that this approach will work in the long term. The problem is, I don't know what approach will work.

Where do we begin?