Managing Strategic Planning to Better Practice

Abstract

Strategic planning (SP) is a mainstream practice in higher education today. By virtue of competition, the demand for transparency, and the need to optimize available resources, SP also has become an important part of higher education management. However, SP in practice is no easy thing to manage effectively. Implementing SP meets barriers arising from various factors: faculty motivation, exogenous limits on institutions, and inflexible and formulaic repetition top the list. This paper defines and describes the basic elements of SP. It then discusses sources of negative feedback for SP management before considering how to minimize their side effects. The paper concludes by advancing several candidate conditions for managing SP to best practice. First, SP should incorporate flexibility and autonomy at the unit level (department or office), together with proactive reception and the absence of scapegoating by higher administration. This aspect of aligned planning includes the need to provide some timeline of anticipated gains for units that invest in the process, and a mechanism for identifying and addressing units that underperform. Second, SP should focus not only on issues of new funding requests, but also tie annual reallocations to assessment and make reallocation of existing funding a real possibility. Third, SP should develop institutional networks that cut across offices, departments, colleges, and divisions. Workforce planning should link academic administration across the institution's divisions. Finally, SP requires the integration of cost accounting and estimates for the value of non-instructional, non-revenue generating units. Models of responsibility-based budgeting, load-balancing, and returns on investment are relevant in this regard. Based upon these elements, an institution using aligned SP may be more effectively managed to become a continuous quality improvement organization. Without them, SP can become a rote practice that fulfills mandates or requirements but does not sustain the educational organization.