My campus uses our organizations strategic plan to develop our departmental action plans. We meet once a year to discuss the organizations goals and strategies and make sure that our department actions are aligned. To date, it's worked really well and we've achieved all of our goals.
Actually this is a very exciting time for me to be involved in the process of strategizing. We are going through re-accreditation, creating new Institutional Effectiveness Plans and re-aligning our Company at large. This has caused for a lot of "role" and job changes, but no matter how stressful that can be, it has allowed / forced us to look at everything we do, if we do it well, and make changes moving forward. Doing this has created some stream-line processing due to centralizing functions. All of these changes and development cause us to talk and communicate more as departments, teams and the College as a whole. We are looking at policy, process and functionality in addition to deciding whether or not we are doing what is in the best-interst of the student, bottom line. At first many employees (and perhaps still) felt the stress of change and the pain of loss (some of control and some of collegues). I am however looking forward to the end-result(s); better processes, better quality and better communication. I even created a new College reporting Plan which was accepted and promoted by our President as a perfect Model of reporting measurements. That said, cleaning-out the closets has opened-up great opportunities we may have never known existed. Perhaps we are making a paradigm shift...for the better.
Unfortunately, I do have examples of when the strategy and implementation have fallen out of synch.
A new product introduction process (NPIP) used a formal NPIP document that had each department implementing changes responsible for writing a "chapter" that documented thier plan. Team meetings were held every other week, but because the subjects were so diverse, everything from marketing brochure design to technical product specifications, to spare parts plans, to training content, people became glassy eyed at first, then stopped attending.
Then, the product design changed to take advantage of a competitive advantage in the market place and the implementation teams missed the signal. It took a lot of extra effort to get back on track once screaming in one department alerted others of the problem. Had the team leader manged the meetings more effectively, the company would have saved a huge amount of money.
Peggy,
Nice example. Connecting overall organizational strategy with key initiatives and timely implementation of those initiatives at the campus level are imperative. To often the broader organizational strategy is not adequetely connected with the people and resources to execute it effectively. It sounds like your organization has made this important connection! Do you have any examples you have seen where the connecting of strategy with required people and resources to execute have not occured?
We are in the process of implementing a new advanced elective course at our campus, one that supports our goal of drawing students from an additional market segment. The elective requires a sequence of large capital purchases and months of instructor training, both requireing close coordination with our home office.
The project itself supports our strategy of expanding in new market segments. The timing of purchases and Instructor readiness supports our financial objective of predictable financial results, for investor confidence.
Part of our overall corporate strategy is for the Marketing department to position our university as an educational thought leader and a community partner. After this course, I will be responsible for refining our unit's strategy and creating an action plan that aligns with it.
As I am fairly new to this subject, I am excited to follow your recomendation on reading EXECUTION to develop a deeper knowledge in this area.
David,
Hope you have enjoyed to course so far. One of the biggest challenges of any strategy is the actual "execution" of the strategy. Execution requires organizational alignment putting the right people with a plan of action to execute against the strategy. Many visionary leaders are good at developing strategy but are poor in actually executing against it. It sounds like you did a great job of aligning your team to "execute" and in the end both students and your organization benefited. Nice work.
If this topic interests you there is a great book called EXECUTION that is authored by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I think it is one of the most important and practical books on executing strategy on the market.
Our campus has undergone a change in how we schedule students. The change allows students to complete their program in a much shorter time. Our challenge was to convert as many current students to the new schedule as possible. Through careful planning adn great team work we accomplished a full conversion in 6 months. Our action plans completely supported the corporate strategy by accomplishing our action plans in such a short timeframe.
