Ed Cornelius
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- Strategic Planning: Create Value, Not Just a Report - February 18, 2015
A colleague of mine once told me that strategic planning is not an event, a weekend retreat or a facilitated meeting. Instead strategic planning is an on-going process that makes organizational mission and vision a reality. Strategy is the unique and sustainable way by which a higher education institution can create value for their faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders.
Truer words were never spoken! Unfortunately not many of us in higher education actually live these words.
Why Strategic Planning Falls Short
We all know the typical strategic planning drill in higher education. That is, every three or four years we gather together to do planning. We take the old plan off the shelf, dust it off, and start again.
We will typically commission a representative group of stakeholders across the institution, which we anoint as the “Planning Committee.” The planning committee will then hold a one or two-day retreat to take a look to see if our mission, vision, and values statements need to be changed. Also, the group will articulate a set of long term goals for the next 3 – 5 years and usually the group will then formulate the attainable goals for the next 12 months.
Unfortunately, and despite good intentions, before the year -sometimes the month- is over, everyone has forgotten the plan that’s now sitting on the top shelf again. What has gone wrong? How can we change this in Higher Ed? What can we do to improve the strategic planning process?
I have a suggestion. It’s a simple one: Let’s put more emphasis on the implementation of the plan!!
In our experience in higher education, institutions that make an effort to implement the strategic plan are more likely to achieve their strategic goals than institutions that don’t put an emphasis on implementation!
We spend much time in putting together the strategic plan, but very little time and thought in how to implement the plans that were developed. Instead of putting the strategic plan on the shelf after the planning committee’s work, let’s take a page from the project management discipline.
Implementing Strategies as Projects
How do you ensure your strategic plan is implemented? We believe each major strategy should be treated as a project- and the project must be managed using modern project management tools and processes. Thus each major strategy will have team leader (owner), team members, a charter, a project schedule, assigned metrics, and a budget!
Further, strategy team leaders must turn in monthly project reports to the Leadership Team of the institution.
And most importantly, all the strategy owners (team leaders) must meet together quarterly with the Leadership Team. At these sessions each strategy owner must present progress made and progress not made during the quarter. The Leadership Team is then responsible for keeping the strategy teams on task and responsible for their goals.
Under these conditions, higher education institutions will actually make progress on their strategic goals, and can have a chance to create superb value for the stakeholders of the institution.
At your next strategic planning session, be sure to spend an adequate amount of time on the implementation plan to see a real impact to strategic goals.
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