Student- and stakeholder-driven excellence is a strategic view of excellence. The focus is on the drivers of student learning; student and stakeholder engagement; new programs, services, and markets; and market share—key factors in educational success and organizational sustainability.
■ Operational performance improvement and innovation contribute to short- and longer-term productivity growth and cost containment. Building operational capability—including speed, responsiveness, and flexibility—represents an investment in strengthening your organizational fitness.
■ Organizational and personal learning are necessary strategic considerations in today’s fast-paced environment. The Criteria emphasize that improvement and learning need to be embedded in work processes. The special role of strategic planning is to align work systems and learning initiatives with your organization’s strategic directions, thereby ensuring that improvement and learning prepare you for and reinforce organizational priorities.
The Strategic Planning category examines how your organization
■ determines its key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; its core competencies; and its ability to execute your strategy
■ optimizes the use of resources, ensures the availability of a skilled and well-prepared workforce, and bridges short- and longer-term requirements that may entail capital expenditures, technology development or acquisition, supplier development, and new partnerships or collaborations
■ ensures that implementation will be effective—that there are mechanisms to communicate requirements and achieve alignment on three levels: (1) the organization and senior leader level; (2) the key work system and work process level; and (3) the work unit, department, school/college, classroom, and individual level
The requirements in the Strategic Planning category encourage strategic thinking and acting in order to develop a basis for a distinct leadership position in your market. These requirements do not imply the need for formal planning departments or specific planning cycles. They also do not imply that all your improvements could or should be planned in advance. An effective improvement system combines improvements of many types and degrees of involvement. This requires clear strategic guidance, particularly when improvement alternatives, including major change or innovation, compete for limited resources. In most cases, setting priorities depends heavily on a cost rationale. However, you also might have critical requirements, such as specific student needs or societal responsibilities, that are not driven by cost considerations alone.