Proposal for a formal follow-up mechanism for the Strategic Plan

The Strategic Plan Advisory Committee makes two proposals to help the College assess the current Strategic Plan and to prepare for the next strategic plan.

The first proposal, “Assessing the 2000-2005 Strategic Plan,” directs the Office of Institutional Research to gather appropriate data to construct an annual report to the College on the proposals approved in the 2000-2005 Strategic Plan. Goals of each of the proposals need to be identified by examining the rationales provided in each proposal. The Office of Institutional Research then needs to identify or construct valid instruments for measuring these goals. Annual reports will compare baseline data (data on the measures for 2005) to data for the relevant years.

The annual reports will be prepared by the Office of Institutional Research and submitted to the President, the Board of Trustees, and the Strategic Plan Advisory Committee.

The second proposal concerns how we might learn from the College’s first experience with strategic planning to improve future efforts. This proposal consists of a series of recommendations for the College’s next strategic plan. Each of these suggestions stems from difficulties experienced in the 2000-2005 Strategic Plan.

Ø The next strategic plan should consider the available (actual and potential) resources for pursuing various strategic proposals (i.e., institutional capacity).

Ø The entire campus community should be involved in the early stages of designing the next strategic plan, identifying institutional goals and objectives.

Ø The next strategic plan should consider the campus climate and the willingness of various constituencies to seriously entertain the possibility of change.

Ø Presidential leadership and active engagement in the plan are necessary throughout the process.

Ø The next strategic plan should effectively utilize the President’s Cabinet and academic department chairs.

Ø The next strategic plan should exhibit a consistency in its focus on long-term goals and the specificity of its proposals. Such consistency could be ensured by using a single final writer.

Ø The plan should not call for “analysis” or “review”. Research is appropriate when preparing for a strategic plan, but the plan should call for action. We believe that such consistency might be better accomplished by having an individual or small group perform this editing task.

Ø The next strategic plan should contain deadlines and clearly identify responsibility for all tasks. Task forces should be kept relatively small to encourage efficiency.

Ø The next Strategic Plan Advisory Committee should have fixed terms for members, replacing old members to provide new energy for the Committee.

Ø The next strategic plan should be more carefully and explicitly tied to both fundraising and the budget to connect priorities to funding.

Cost-benefit analysis:

The costs associated with the first proposal (assessing proposals from the current strategic plan) involve time of members of the Office of Institutional Research. Some of the assessment ought to be covered by the general job description of the Director (see Institutional Research home page). The benefits involve our ability to identify which proposals should be continued and which should be terminated. Obviously, the costs and benefits of those proposals are a function of the particular proposal.

The costs associated with the second proposal (the next strategic plan) involve time, particularly for the President. The amount of time is difficult to calculate, but it should not be onerous. The benefits involve our ability to execute the next strategic plan in a more timely fashion, and to construct a plan that is truly strategic, i.e., forward-looking.

Rationale:

The first proposal is necessary to assess the progress of our current strategic plan. Although the various Task Forces (and other entities designing proposals) have conducted extensive research concerning their proposals, we cannot know all consequences of a program in advance of its implementation. Once implemented, a program’s goals and objectives identified in the proposal’s rationale can be measured to indicate degrees of success. Effective programs can be continued and expanded; ineffective ones can be terminated. In a more refined way, good assessment can help the College identify specific aspects of these proposals that should be modified to enhance the program’s effectiveness (short of eliminating the program). As the College engages in more – and more sophisticated – assessment we can increase the value of our programs and the quality of our education.

The second proposal is needed to enable us to learn from the experience with our first strategic plan. Most aspects of this proposal call for changes in the way we construct a strategic plan, acknowledging weaknesses and flaws in the design of the present plan. The current plan consumed an enormous amount of time for large numbers of faculty, staff, and students. And in numerous cases, their work did not lead to proposals that were truly “strategic”. However, there were exceptions, and we should benefit from recognizing those successful efforts.

The current strategic plan was mandated by the Board in 1999, and the College embarked on a series of discussions to identify priorities for the College. These discussions served an important purpose in establishing a general consensus for an agenda. Future strategic plans should acknowledge the value in reaching such a consensus, facilitating and focusing discussions of directions for strategic change. Widespread and thoughtful participation are key elements in establishing such a consensus.

Following the establishment of this consensus, however, the plan encountered resistance tied to the role of the President. The President appointed committees to formulate the plan, and some members of the Faculty Assembly objected to that method of constituting the committees. Consequently, some committees felt hamstrung and lacking in legitimacy. Such reticence led to portions of the strategic plan looking like plans for study rather than strategic action. On the other hand, some committees did not display similar reticence and formulated very specific action details. As a consequence, the strategic plan had an unevenness that puzzled and confused observers and participants. Complicating this unevenness, some committees formulated action details that were specific, but short-term (i.e., not strategic). These action details more closely resembled a description of the normal day-to-day operations in a given office.

Solving these problems is not a simple matter because they resulted from a number of causes. The current strategic plan suffered from a lack of legitimacy tied to the role of the President in the process. It was exacerbated by the differential responses to that lack of legitimacy. Some participants proposed action; some proposed review. Further, some administrative offices resisted thinking strategically and simply “plugged in” their day-to-day workload and agenda to the strategic plan. To solve these problems, we must attend to the legitimacy of the plan and the role of the President in establishing that legitimacy. We must also ensure that the plan is truly strategic by providing final drafting authority to some one or some group empowered to make the document more consistent.

An additional problem beset the current strategic plan. Many participants doubted that their decisions would become authoritative. The reasons were at least two-fold. First, the President never indicated that the decisions of the Task Forces would actually guide policy change. Members of the Task Forces repeatedly wanted to defer to the President’s judgment on all policy questions. They often believed that their proposals would not go forward, and they did not want to spend time formulating proposals that the President would later veto. Second, many Task Force members doubted the College’s sincerity in calling for strategic change when fiscal conditions were straitened. Many proposals required (at least potentially) significant expenditures of funds that faculty and staff doubted would materialize. Tellingly, budget discussions were incremental, making small adjustments in the various categories of the budget to minimize deficits rather than being guided by strategic concerns.

Again, to solve these problems, Presidential engagement in the process is a key matter. However, in this case, the President needs to empower Task Force members to believe that their ideas and proposals will matter. Additionally, the connection between strategic planning and financial resources (budgeting and fundraising) must be more carefully established. The need for financial resources in engaging in effective strategic planning may call for assessing the College’s available resources before calling for the next strategic plan.

Task Forces suffered from an additional problem limiting their effectiveness and progress. To increase representativeness, some Task Forces were very large. Developing consensus and making decisions became exceedingly difficult due to the size of the groups. These difficulties were, of course, exacerbated by some of the factors mentioned above. Additionally, the lack of deadlines allowed these unproductive discussions to continue in an open-ended fashion. Deadlines were eschewed initially because we believed Task Forces needed that freedom, and extensive coordination between Task Forces was envisioned. This simply proved to be wrong. Consequently, we need to form smaller Task Forces guided by deadlines in the next strategic plan.

The next strategic plan needs to also make better use of the President’s Cabinet and the Strategic Plan Advisory Committee. Although Presidential leadership and engagement are necessary for a successful strategic plan, much of the day-to-day activity must be spurred by members of the President’s Cabinet. The Strategic Plan Advisory Committee also bears some responsibility for monitoring and encouraging the progress of Task Forces. Presidential engagement ought to involve members of the Cabinet, but the Strategic Plan Advisory Committee could have benefited from “new blood” as the strategic plan wore on. Fixed terms for committee members and a clear sense of the perspectives and skills needed by the committee would have made the committee more effective and energetic.