While strategic planning is a great help for higher education management, best practices are excellent tools to facilitate strategic planning implementation.
They help to constantly remind people of the final goals to be accomplished and avoid people getting lost in daily tasks, to align different personal approaches with common objectives and to strengthen people’s engagement and motivation, among other benefits.
Now, as we explained in a previous blog, universities must assure some success factors in order to have proper strategic planning implementation – and these factors may also apply for best practices. Clear institutional vision, commitment, communication and responsive help best practices to be really effective and to be perceived by people as real support.
Most best practices that higher education institutions have been using to assure an appropriate implementation of a strategic plan are related to how people get involved in the strategic planning process, because at the end of the day success mostly depends on people, how people understand, implement, use and finally engage with a strategic plan to achieve goals.
The global information services company Hanover Research developed the “Strategic planning in higher education: Best practices and benchmarking” report, which summarizes most of the best practices that universities are using nowadays:
- Involving faculty, staff and students in plan development. You get better results when strategic planning is everyone’s mission inside a higher education institution.
- Holding meetings to get input before planning. In order to actually count on everyone’s involvement, first, you have to recollect people’s opinion to know how they can really help in the process.
- Holding meetings to get input on draft strategic plans. Your team can help to improve strategic planning by giving inputs about the daily reality and internal culture of the institution, which are basic considerations that facilitate the design and implementation process.
- Collectively reviewing data to identify measures of success. Once more, people is the key to success. Ask your team for the help to set the right metrics.
- Setting short‐term goals in “bite‐size” pieces in addition to longer‐term goals. A big goal divided into a series of smaller objectives help people to assume a big challenge – such as strategic planning implementation – more easily.
- Monitoring progresses through periodic checks. By constant checking, it’s easier to maintain the course of such a long-term process as a strategic planning implementation.
Also, consultant Patrick Sanaghan and expert Mary Hinton propose in an essay – published in Inside Higher Ed – some best practices related to the balance that should exist between the different players of this process.
- The board of trustees need to have a balanced role in the strategic planning process. “Having faculty and other campus community stakeholders lead the strategic planning process may be difficult for some trustees to hear as they often take seriously their charge of setting the trajectory and strategic priorities of the institution. This is a trend that presidents across higher education are reporting. Of course, trustees need to play a prominent and informed role in the planning process. However, while they are responsible for ensuring the plan is carried out and strategic goals accomplished, the day-to-day execution of the plan happens on the campus,” Sanaghan and Hinton explain.
- It is important to avoid "listening to yourself too much." Attention to the external environment is an ongoing necessity and practice. Faculty and administrators need to pay attention to what is going on regionally, nationally and internationally (…). Campus stakeholders throughout the campus, not just the senior level, need to understand the big picture and changing the context of higher education on an ongoing basis. This type of engagement can only happen if the president and senior leaders create opportunities for people to convene and discuss the events, trends and issues facing their institution. This is not a one-shot thing. There should be multiple opportunities throughout the year for these important and strategic discussions. These internal SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses are a vital component of the planning process and remain equally critical once the plan is implemented in order to ensure assessment of the plan is realistic and ongoing."
As strategies should be suitable for each higher education institution, best practices also need to be a fair reflex of campus culture, so the definition and implementation of these tools must always count on the contribution of every stakeholder of the organization.
How does your university manage to implement a strategic planning with the help of internal stakeholders? In your experience, what are the most effective best practices to implement a strategic planning in a university? We invite you to share a comment.