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About College Planning

Planning is often not a linear process, and involves regular re-focusing and re-examining.

Planning processes and content are made stronger by a diversity of thought and opinion.

The college plan is part of the process, not the end of the process.

College planning involves:

  • Creation of planning teams and framework: convene; negotiate; request resources; align actions; environmental scanning and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis; liaise to executive leadership; build the plan so it is implementable and aligned to university priorities; strategic issues identification (including tactics; metrics; implementation teams and stakeholders; budget planning; unit planning; planning resources and gap analysis)
  • Development of mandates (formal and informal)
  • Creation of communications plans (audience; key messages; schedule for communicating; delivery methods)
  • Implementation of plans (processes are repeatable, definable, understandable; evaluate outcomes; work on barriers that are risks to strategic initiatives and tactics; review and revise the plan) 

Key questions for college planning are:

  • Who is responsible/ the authority to set the target?
  • Who is accountable to meet the target?
  • What is organizational capacity? List out physical resources, IT resources, fiscal resources, people resources
  • What measurements (milestones) will track, monitor, and assess the effectiveness of the plan? Where will you get the data, and who is responsible for tracking the metric, and how often?