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

Rod Rose Vice President, STRATUS, a division of the JCM Group (www.stratus.nu) Los Angeles, CA

ON SCIENCE, MISSION AND MANAGEMENT ...

"I like to consider strategic planning as a bit of a science. It's talked about as a big, formal process, but really, it's nothing more than a scientific method of understanding the environment a school is in and planning for the future. To understand the environment, I apply S.W.O.T. analysis: I look at the school's strengths (S), its weaknesses (W), its opportunities (0), and its threats (T). You can't answer any questions about the future unless you've charted these four categories first.

"After this, of course, central to the strategic planning process is the mission statement. Here, schools need to ask themselves what situation they're in, what is unique about what they do, and what they are capable of. In a consensus-based environment, you're bound to get enough out of questions like these to evoke a clear-cut mission. In the end, though, you should have enough raw data to put together something useful.

"With this data, the final step is management. Managers and university officials must come together regularly and apply the mission statement they create to everything the university hopes to do. Too often, schools go through the effort of putting together a strategic plan, and then they go back to their jobs. Once a school establishes a plan, that plan should be constantly revisited and applied to every decision that's made.