One of the most worthwhile resolutions that your Association can adopt in 2018 is to prepare a management plan. Just like a business plan helps a corporation, a good management plan for your Association should be a document that provides your Board with visibility into situations that need to be addressed, as well as the optimum time for addressing them.

It should be a birds-eye view of your overall status and should take into account such issues as:

• a reserve study
• our reserve projects schedule
• contract renewal dates
• scheduled meeting dates
• budget notice dates; amongst others.

The management plan should map these out over the course of the entire coming year. This approach ensures that everyone on the Board can see when particular issues will need to be dealt with, and it should assure they get proper attention at the most opportune time of year.

Before any specific issues are addressed, it might be a useful exercise to have your Board think about a few fundamental questions, which could then serve as a guideline for further specific planning, such as:

• Is everyone in the Association familiar with the organization’s legal structure and organizational chart?
• What exactly is the financial condition of the Association, and is some level of planning necessary to address this condition?
• Apart from financial resources, what other kinds of resources are available to the Association (e.g. people, amenities, etc.)?
• Which values and conditions are of the greatest importance to the residents, and how do we intend to implement these?
• What kinds of conditions are currently present in the general community, and do any of these conditions need to be encouraged or reversed?

By addressing these questions, your Board will have mental preparation for addressing specific issues through proper planning, so they can be resolved in the most advantageous way. By looking at the big picture now, and planning for timely issue resolution, major problems can be either minimized or avoided altogether.

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