In today’s dynamic higher education landscape, institutions need a clear roadmap to guide progress. A strategic plan gives structure to your institution’s vision of success and your intended pathway to achieve it. However, many institutions find it challenging to formulate a coherent plan that lays out an effective route to achieving their goals. This guide will help you overcome common challenges in strategic planning and develop an optimal plan for realizing your institutional vision.
Why your institution needs a strategic plan
If you’re wondering whether it’s worth investing the time to create a formal strategic plan, you should consider the tangible advantages of having one. Developing a strategic plan can benefit your institution in several ways:
Motivation: A strategic plan articulates a shared vision, mission, and values, inspiring team members to pursue the strategic outcomes. It also helps faculty members understand how their contributions relate to the institution’s larger mission and goals. This can help improve employee engagement and satisfaction.
Efficiency: A strategic plan organizes your institutional functions into a coherent set of priorities, helping you allocate resources like time, effort, and money.
Clarity: A strategic plan defines success and how you measure it, transforming abstract intentions into concrete objectives. For example, a strategic plan can translate a value like committing to equity into specific steps that increase representation and reduce disparities.
Agility: A strategic plan sets up a steady, future-oriented rhythm of progress. When unexpected obstacles arise, you have a stronger position from which to adapt as necessary while maintaining a trajectory toward your goals. Strategic planning also involves forward-looking elements such as predicting future industry developments. This helps prepare your institution, faculty, and students to face shifting professional landscapes.
Engagement: A strategic planning process brings together faculty and other stakeholders like students and community members to start productive conversations about shared priorities. This promotes a mentality of shared ownership of long-term student and institutional success. It also establishes positive relationships, setting up a foundation for greater trust and honest feedback in subsequent interactions.
Collaboration: A strategic plan is a point of reference for faculty members with differing roles and backgrounds to navigate collaboration on projects aimed at achieving key objectives. This can set a positive tone for future collaborations.
Student outcomes: A strategic plan is your game plan to help your students succeed. It highlights the key areas for improvement to drive student success and the KPIs that help you measure progress. Areas for improvement could include equity, accessibility, retention, or pass rates. All students can benefit from belonging to an institution with a clear strategic plan geared toward their success.
Accreditation: A strategic plan is helpful during accreditation processes. You can use your strategic objectives and KPIs to ensure your programs conform to accreditation standards. Strategic planning documents are also excellent evidence that your institution is committed to continuous improvement, which most accreditation bodies require in their standards.
Planning process: Introduce your strategic planning committee, timeline, analysis methods, and other procedures involved in developing this plan. You can refine these as best practices for future updates.
Vision, mission, and values: The foundations of your strategic plan are your institution’s long-term aspirations, its guiding purpose, and the ethical commitments shaping your interactions with stakeholders.
Goals and objectives: Goals are the outcomes your institution aims to achieve, while objectives are the specific, time-based steps you need to accomplish to realize those aims.
Strategies, tactics, and processes: These are the overall approaches, specific actions, and daily workflows you will use to achieve your goals and objectives.
Key performance indicators (KPIs): KPIs are the quantifiable metrics you’ll track and compare to targets and benchmarks you set during planning. They should provide ongoing feedback that reflects whether you are on track to achieve your objectives.
When to conduct strategic planning
A typical horizon for strategic planning is five to 10 years. As this period unfolds, it’s advisable to convene your planning committee regularly to discuss whether your progress is on track and whether new circumstances require any updates to the plan. When the end of the period approaches, schedule the next strategic plan’s development process before the present plan expires to ensure a smooth transition.
Occasionally, you may need to overhaul or replace your strategic plan early. This should be rare but may be necessary if your institution experiences a major change in leadership or other sudden and substantial shifts.
Strategic planning challenges to overcome
Institutions can run into several obstacles that hinder effective strategic planning. Anticipating these potential challenges can help you prepare to overcome them. Common challenges include:
Communication issues: Developing and implementing a strategic plan requires communication between faculty and other stakeholders. When these parties neglect open, regular communication with each other, the process becomes slow and inefficient. Choose effective platforms for real-time engagement to Sstreamline communication.
Strategic misalignment: Different departments often have distinct priorities that may lead to strategic misalignments. Aim to balance these interests while focusing on shared goals like maximizing institution-wide student success.
Slow uptake: Between institutional inertia and pressure to adopt frequent changes as legal, social, and academic contexts change, some departments may be sluggish in adopting further changes in a strategic plan. Provide consistent messaging about the importance and benefits of implementing a strategic plan to improve motivation.
Lack of leadership: While strategic planning involves collaboration between many different parties, there should be a single person leading the planning committee and driving decisions. This helps prevent progress from stalling due to a lack of ownership. The person overseeing the process should be responsible for compiling documents, scheduling discussions, and following up on each party’s progress between touchpoints.
10 Strategic planning tips
If your institution is entering a strategic planning process, the following tips can help you overcome common challenges as you draw up your roadmap to success.
1. Set trackable KPIs
Your strategic plan is only as good as your KPIs. Establish clear, specific, measurable indicators to track progress. These metrics can help you evaluate your current situation, set targets, and measure success along the way. Regular touchpoints provide an opportunity to maintain accountability as everyone works toward their KPI targets.
Your KPIs should be related to your objectives. Aim to set one to three relevant KPIs for each objective so you can monitor progress. For example, you may have the objective of improving minority student retention by 20% over the next two years. Your quarterly drop-out and transfer rates for minority students would be relevant KPIs to track progress in this area.
In higher education, KPIs typically belong to five categories:
Student success
Finances
Enrollment and retention
Faculty and staff
Facilities and resources
Aim to set at least a few KPIs in each of these categories. While student success is every school’s top priority, incorporating targets in the other areas will help your students maximize their potential in the long term.
2. Use specific language
Articulating each part of your strategic plan with specific, concrete language helps minimize misunderstandings. When the language is clear and actionable, everyone knows what they need to achieve and can move forward without wasting time on clarifications and unnecessary disagreements. Specific language is especially important when defining goals, objectives, KPIs, and workflows.
3. Keep an eye on implementation
Even the best strategic plans rely on committed implementation to succeed. Keep the practicalities of implementation in mind throughout the planning phase, asking at each step what will be necessary to execute on the plan and what challenges you need to anticipate. Preparing for implementation involves asking key questions like:
Who will do it?
How?
When?
What resources will they need?
What obstacles could arise, and how can we overcome them?
Build answers to these questions into your strategic plan to ensure everyone is prepared for implementation.
4. Establish a culture of accountability
Accountability is vital for effective strategic plan implementation. Schedule regular touchpoints for each department to report on their KPI progress. This keeps everyone accountable for their commitments and ensures implementation moves forward.
5. Embrace diverse perspectives
Encourage diverse stakeholders to contribute their voices to your strategic planning process. Form a dedicated strategic planning committee, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members. Their perspectives can help you correct for biases and better serve the interests of a diverse student body and the institution’s broader community.
Although the members should be diverse, the committee can be relatively small to improve efficiency. Around 10 to 12 people should be able to handle most of the work involved in strategic planning, though they will benefit from consulting and surveying others. Senior administrative staff, like your institution’s president, should be permanent members of this committee. Faculty, student, and community representative members can serve one or two-year terms to ensure the committee benefits from fresh perspectives.
6. Think ahead
The most effective strategic plans take a long view. This includes:
Casting a vision: Articulate a specific description of where you want your institution to be after an extended period, like five years. You can then work backward from these goals to define the objectives, KPIs, and processes you need to achieve them.
Multi-year planning: Creating the most efficient and realistic pathway to your long-term goals requires multi-year planning, including budgets and KPI targets. These will need adjusting but will give you a structured starting point to adapt to changing circumstances. If you do come in under or over your budget projections, analyzing the reasons can guide more efficient spending over the next budget period.
Considering trends: Your multi-year plan should account for present realities but also informed projections about the future direction of higher education trends. This could involve budgeting to adopt new technologies and scheduling regular faculty training in new teaching methodologies.
7. Seek alignment between departments
Throughout planning and implementation, maintain communication channels between departments to keep departmental initiatives aligned with institutional objectives. Look for opportunities for departments to collaborate on interdisciplinary research, student projects, and community outreach. Treat interdepartmental touchpoints as opportunities to reinforce shared priorities related to your strategic plan and celebrate each department’s contributions.
8. Consider risks
To give your strategic plan the best chance of success, it’s important to build in considerations of risks and how to meet them. For example, institutions face the risk of declining enrollment, which can impact revenue and hinder progress toward KPI targets. A proactive plan to address this risk would be to invest in marketing campaigns to build your institution’s brand among diverse student demographics. Other risks for institutions to consider include:
Competing institutions attracting more students and faculty.
Rapid technological innovations requiring substantial time and money investments to adapt.
Crime, disease, and cybersecurity threats.
Demographic factors like falling birth and immigration rates impacting recruitment.
9. Foster a growth mindset
Strategic planning is already geared toward improvement over time. But for sustainable progress, aim beyond successfully achieving the present plan’s targets. Along with accomplishing these outcomes, look for improvements in your choices of objectives and in the planning process itself.
Feedback is a key resource for improving your strategic plan and the planning process. Use surveys and focus groups to invite various perspectives into the conversation about improving your strategic planning. You can ask these parties questions like:
What are this institution’s three greatest strengths?
What are this institution’s three greatest weaknesses?
Which objectives would you add to this plan that it doesn’t yet include?
On a scale of 1-10, how much would following this plan help the institution and serve its interests?
Customizable templates that allow you to add your goals and objectives.
Automated data collection functions you can integrate with your learning management system (LMS) for seamless KPI monitoring.
Centralized data insights to inform your planning and monitor implementation.
Streamline strategic planning with Watermark
Effective strategic planning has two main ingredients — communication and data. When you combine timely, relevant, data-driven insights with efficient institution-wide communication, you can generate a successful strategic plan. For a software solution that helps you create and implement a strategic plan tailored to your institution’s vision, try Watermark Planning & Self-Study.
This strategic planning software solution will help you:
Inspire progress with interactive dashboards showing your strategic KPIs.
Monitor implementation across programs with a centralized interface.
Support campus-wide communication, collaboration, and data analysis.
