Comprehensive Planning Activities

In the United States, courts play a vital role as neutral forums for resolving disputes—essential to upholding the rule of law. This role includes restraining abuses of power, protecting civil rights, ensuring predictability in commerce, enhancing public safety, and providing victims a structured, nonviolent process to seek compensation. The effectiveness of the Judicial Branch is critical to the success of our democratic government.

However, fulfilling this role is not guaranteed. Beyond the complexities of interpreting and applying laws, courts face significant administrative challenges, including managing thousands of employees across hundreds of locations—some operating 24/7 to ensure continuous access to services. To address these challenges, courts require mechanisms to support sound decision-making, not only in adjudication but also in managing operations and establishing long-term policies, procedures, and programs.

Change management tools like strategic planning provide such mechanisms. Strategic planning enables court organizations to define and periodically reaffirm their roles, responsibilities, and purpose. These concepts are often referred to as an organization’s “mission and mandates.” Since the 1980s, the Virginia court system, guided by the Office of the Executive Secretary (OES) of the Supreme Court of Virginia, has consistently engaged in strategic planning to strengthen its operations and fulfill its mission.

Virginia’s court system has been significantly influenced by the 1989 report of the Commission on the Future of Virginia’s Judicial System. Following this report, the court system adopted its current mission statement, which continues to guide its strategic planning efforts:

To provide an independent, accessible, responsive forum for the just resolution of disputes
in order to preserve the rule of law and to protect all rights and liberties guaranteed 
by the United States and Virginia constitutions.

The Virginia court system’s mission statement and strategic plans emphasize that its role goes beyond merely “resolving disputes” mechanically, like a factory producing identical widgets. How disputes are resolved and operations are managed is equally critical to fulfilling the mission effectively. Accordingly, the court system upholds key values such as judicial independence, due process, accessibility, dignity, responsiveness to change, timeliness, fairness, accountable management, and public trust.

Guided by its mission and values, the court system uses four primary information sources to assess priorities and shape strategies for improvement:

1. Public Opinion Research: Gathering feedback from external "consumers" with recent court experiences to understand their perspectives.
2. Internal Insights: Input from judges, clerks, magistrates, and support staff regarding working conditions, resources, policies, and procedures that impact adjudication and administration.
3. Futures Research: Monitoring trends in science, technology, economics, demographics, government, education, etc. to anticipate challenges and opportunities that could affect the courts' mission.
4. Expert Findings: Drawing on recommendations from commissions and study groups, both specific to Virginia and from regional or national initiatives.

These information sources help the court system align its operations with its mission and values while preparing for future challenges and opportunities.

The court system periodically convenes expert groups to analyze data from various sources and provide findings and recommendations. The Office of the Executive Secretary (OES) and other stakeholders evaluate this feedback to draft a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan for review by the Judicial Council and Supreme Court of Virginia. Once the Supreme Court formally adopts the plan, it informs judiciary budget requests and guides the development of specific operational tasks to implement the strategies.

The Executive Secretary actively identifies and oversees these tasks, which are carefully prioritized to allocate resources effectively. The planning process includes ongoing monitoring and evaluation to ensure timely and effective implementation and to determine whether strategies achieve their intended goals. Operational feedback is then incorporated into the planning cycle, creating a continuous improvement process.