2.1 Strategy Development: How do you develop your strategy?
Purpose
This item examines how your organization determines its core competencies, strategic challenges, and strategic advantages and establishes its strategic objectives to address its challenges and leverage its advantages. The aim is to strengthen your overall performance, competitiveness, and future success.
Comments
■ This item calls for basic information on the planning process and for information on all the key influences, risks, challenges, and other requirements that might affect your organization’s future opportunities and directions—taking as long-term a view as appropriate and possible from the perspectives of your organization and your market. This approach is intended to provide a thorough and realistic context for the development of a student-, stakeholder-, and market-focused strategy to guide ongoing decision making, resource allocation, and overall management.
■ This item is intended to cover all types of education organizations, market situations, strategic issues, planning approaches, and plans. The requirements explicitly call for a future-oriented basis for action but do not imply the need for formal planning departments, specific planning cycles, or a specified way of visualizing the future. Even if your organization is seeking to create an entirely new program or structure, it is still necessary to set and to test the objectives that define and guide critical actions and performance.
■ This item emphasizes how the organization develops a competitive leadership position in its educational programs and services, which usually depends on operational effectiveness. A competitive leadership position requires a view of the future that includes not only the market in which your organization competes but also how it competes. How it competes presents many options and requires that you understand your organization’s and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. How it competes also might involve decisions on taking intelligent risks in order to gain or retain a market leadership position. Although no specific time horizons are included, the thrust of this item is a sustained performance leadership.
■ An increasingly important part of strategic planning is projecting the future competitive and collaborative environment. This includes the ability to project your own future performance, as well as that of your competitors. Such projections help you to detect and reduce competitive threats, to shorten reaction time, and to identify opportunities. Depending on student and stakeholder needs, the potential need for new core competencies, external factors (e.g., changing requirements brought about by education mandates, instructional technology, or changing demographics), internal factors (e.g., faculty and staff capabilities and needs), and, as appropriate, competitive parameters (e.g., price, costs, or the innovation rate), organizations might use a variety of modeling, scenarios, or other techniques and judgments to anticipate the competitive and collaborative environment.
2.2 Strategy Implementation: How do you implement your strategy?
Purpose
This item examines how your organization converts your strategic objectives into action plans to accomplish the objectives. It also examines how your organization assesses progress relative to these action plans. The aim is to ensure that your strategies are successfully deployed for goal achievement.
Comments
■ This item asks how your action plans are developed and deployed to your workforce, key suppliers, and partners. The accomplishment of action plans requires resources and performance measures, as well as the alignment of the plans of your work units, suppliers, and partners. Of central importance is how you achieve alignment and consistency—for example, via work systems, work processes, and key measurements. Also, alignment and consistency are intended to provide a basis for setting and communicating priorities for ongoing improvement activities—part of the daily work of all work units. In addition, performance measures are critical for tracking performance.
■ Many types of analyses can be performed to ensure that financial resources are available to support the accomplishment of your action plans, while your organization also meets existing obligations. The specific types of analysis will vary for different kinds of education organizations. These analyses should help your organization assess the financial viability of your current operations and the potential viability of and risks associated with your action plan initiatives.
■ Action plans should include human resource or workforce plans that are aligned with and support your overall strategy.
■ Examples of possible human resource plan elements are
• a redesign of your work organization and jobs to increase workforce empowerment and decision making
• initiatives to promote greater labor-management cooperation, such as union partnerships
• initiatives to prepare for future workforce capability and capacity needs
• initiatives to foster knowledge sharing and organizational learning
• education and initiatives, such as developmental assignments to prepare future leaders, partnerships to ensure the availability of a qualified and skilled workforce, and the establishment of training programs on new technologies important to the future success of your workforce and your organization