21. Písek, Czech Republic:Success and failure in managing the implementation of an economic development strategic plan
Písek is a town of approximately 30,000 located in south Bohemia, some 110 km south of Prague. Písek can be characterized by high-quality environment within the city and in the whole region. The historical character of the old town has been well preserved, and it fits well with the post-war industrialization and traditional importance devoted to education and cultural heritage. Pisek is traditionally an industrial city that produces textiles. The Jitex Pisek textile factory was once the major employer, but transition and restructuring have reduced its dominance significantly.
The Problem
The city created a strategic economic development plan in 2001 with assistance from a professional consulting firm. They established an implementation management and monitoring committee and started to implement and monitor results of their strategic plan's projects. This activity was influenced by a number of factors:
- Enthusiasm in the business sector and public institutions has dropped after the planning process was over and the consultants left. It remained high with people working on some projects (such as the industrial zone), but there were individuals who had responsibilities in the plan but were reluctant to play a very active role afterwards.
- Monitoring of the plan became a serious issue. The plan had some 30 projects in three critical issues. The city created a position of Strategic Plan implementation manager, who was responsible for day-to-day contact with the project managers but also had other economic development responsibilities. Keeping track of all developments in the plan became a paper-intensive exercise with little visible value.
- The IMC monthly meetings became very tiring and depressing. — if each project was to be discussed for 5 minutes only (and this is hardly enough time for discussion), it would take 2 1/2 hours of very tiresome presentations. Some projects were very trivial — they had repetitive, recurring character, and the presentation was same each month. Monitoring was the complete opposite of planning — it was not creative, and soon, some people from the business sector refrained from further participation in the activity.
The Solution
On the other hand, there were many positive examples of where strategic planning did work in Pisek:
The industrial zone became the best zone of the Czech Republic in 2003. It attracted a lot of new investors, and today, its 45 hectares are fully taken and are used mostly for export-oriented production. Japanese, French, and German investors have located their Czech operations in the zone and are expanding their production capacities as well as numbers of people employed there.
Despite the negative trend in unemployment in the Czech republic between 2000 and 2004 and fast downsizing in the traditional companies, Pisek created new jobs faster, and this can be demonstrated in figures: whereas in 2001, the unemployment rate was 1.2 percentage points lower than the state average, in 2005, the gap doubled to 2.5 percentage points lower than the state average.
Pisek was able to recover quickly from the enormous flood damage in 2002. All major sites were reconstructed, and yet the activities on the strategic plan implementation did not stop and projects that the city was able to control were implemented.
Besides the industrial zone, which is a remarkable success story even in national terms, one of the most successful achievements was in housing development. In 2001, the city was thinking about how to start some development in housing construction, so that the new company workers could move to Pisek. There were projects that would be model examples of private-public partnership that would encourage private developers to pursue housing development opportunities. This pilot project was implemented, and today, there are several residential development projects around Pisek creating new apartments and high-standard family houses in a faster pace than expected.
In addition, with the accession to the EU, structural development funds became available to Czech cities. Pisek had projects prepared as a result of the strategic planning process and became the most successful applicant from the whole region of South Bohemia, attracting the largest sum of development funds that involved reconstruction of important historical objects in the city.
High-infrastructure investments have been made by the city, financed from credit and, partially, from its own resources, that increased the city’s capacity to host conferences and conventions, as envisioned in the strategic plan.
There is a steady growth of tourists visiting the city every year, as measured by the newly established Tourist Information Center.
A chamber of commerce was established in the city, which attracted new members and created a Web-accessible database of entrepreneurial activities in the region, organized Pisek’s annual business forum, and initiated many training activities for entrepreneurs.
The Results
Four years after the adoption of the plan, it became apparent that the strategy has been implemented. Almost two-thirds of projects were implemented as planned. Half of the remaining remaining ones were not implemented (some were started but failed because of financing or other external issues), some were never started, and half were implemented differently than originally envisioned. The update of the strategic plan was inevitable, and therefore, in late 2004, the city council commissioned an update of the process with a professional consulting firm.
The guiding principles in the work and key lessons learned are that:
- The plan must contain fewer projects.
- Financing must be built into all projects.
- There must be a more clever and collaborative way to monitor the projects — not necessarily through meetings, but maybe through a Web-accessible database.
- The resulting projects must target external funds.
- Modern economic development methods must be used — industrial clusters, collaborative alliances, business incubators, strategic service infrastructure, destination management in tourism, etc.
