From plan to action: even the best laid strategic plans can go awry. Here, from the trenches, some sound advice about how to turn the vision into reality

University Business, July, 2004 by Matt Villano

According to Semmler, Ithaca's process was similar and focused on the unification of myriad priorities. There, strategic planning began with the arrival of President Peggy Williams in 1998. In researching a "unified vision" for the future, Semmler says she and Williams put together a committee of 24 faculty members, staffers, and students, and convened the group monthly to discuss goals. The committee settled on nine basic priorities ranging from academic programs and experiential learning to resource development. Committee members then recruited additional stakeholders to help flesh out suggestions for each of the individual areas. Finally, near the end of the 2001 school year, an institutional plan (www.ithaca.edu/plan) was born.

More meetings, more movement, At Purdue, administrators needed to assess goals and move the strategic planning process forward even more quickly than at Wesleyan and Ithaca. Desperate for the kind of formalized strategic vision they had not had before, in early 2001 school officials recruited Rabindra Mukerjea (a professionally trained architect and Iowa State University professor of architecture) as director of Strategic Planning and Assessment. Mukerjea, a strategic planning wiz who had been involved with strategic planning procedures at a number of higher learning institutions, arrived in March of that year, and almost immediately convened a 28-member committee consisting of academics, school officials, and students to discuss the future. Instead of meeting quarterly or even monthly, the committee met once a week, every week, from March to October, vetting the document until they compiled a draft for presidential approval The draft, a bold, 10-page manifesto titled "The Next Level: Preeminence," received formal approval in November, Less than nine months after Mukerjea was hired. Among other things, the plan detailed goals for aggressive fundraising, physical expansion, and dramatically improved student-teacher ratios. Save for minor tweaks here and there, Mukerjea says that the plan (www.purdue.edu/oop/strategic plan) has gone relatively unchanged since then, and it has been actionable.

"Typically these processes take at Least two years," he says. "But here at Purdue, we wanted a crisp, succinct document that linked the big picture to action. We wanted it quickly, and those were the goals that drove us throughout the entire process."

To make sure the university continues to move the plan components into action, Purdue officials deliver an annual Strategic Planning Progress Report utilizing three types of metrics to gauge just how well the institution is meeting its goals. If the school is meeting expectations, the plan moves forward as is. If the institution is falling short on its goals, something is immediately changed--either the practice or the plan itself, says Mukerjea.

Though some schools seek to incorporate strategic thinking into more conventional growth plans, again, many seemingly disparate elements must converge to make the growth a reality. As it does for so many higher ed institutions, at Christopher Newport University (VA), strategic planning dovetailed with a sizable ($250 million) capital construction effort to overhaul the physical campus. And as it is for so many colleges and universities, this kind of plan is no short-term affair; for Christopher Newport it began back in 1996. At that time, President Paul Trible kicked off the effort as a drive to make the school "one of America's preeminent public liberal arts universities." Though his mantra was broad, Trible focused on issues such as freshman retention and improved internal standards to raise SAT averages by an ambitious 200 points. An international design firm (Arlington-based Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall; www.dmjm.com) was brought in to make major upgrades to the tiny, 10-acre campus and redesign various components of the school's exterior. Renowned architect I.M. Pei was commissioned to design a $54 million center for the arts. Dormitories were redesigned and the school's perimeter was extended, pushing campus right up to the side of a major thoroughfare so that passersby could see that Christopher Newport was on the move. The plan, says Trible, made a "world of difference" in establishing credibility in the community, and the school is slowly but surely attracting students with better SAT scores, and climbing up the ranking charts. "Everything we did was connected [to our vision for preeminence]," he says.