Strategic Planning: Lessons Learned While Starting from Scratch

This past year, the Tulane University Division of Student Affairs has been engaged in the development of a three-year strategic plan. The Division has not had a comprehensive strategic plan in over a decade. From one perspective, the lack of any recent plan allowed the Division members to start from scratch. However, starting from scratch also meant that it took several months to get into our groove of understanding the nuance of creating a plan that ideally would meet the goal of a common vision for 150 student affairs professionals. I thought it would be interesting to identify three valuable lessons that we learned in the past year as we moved through the strategic planning process.

Lesson One: Identify a steering committee that represents all levels of employees within the Division.

This lesson emerged from a piece of advice from a colleague at Emory University and proved to be incredibly valuable. By setting up a committee of 10 – 12 people representing a variety of departments and positional leadership levels, we were able to hear diverse perspectives on how staff members thought about their work within the context of both the Division and the larger University. Staff members who were not a leadership level of management were particularly helpful in surfacing how their staff peers were perceiving the strategic planning process and the needs of students they were interacting with on a daily basis. The experience of being on the steering committee became a critical professional development experience for all of the members as initial ideas and concepts had to be refined into a document with consensus and buy in from the group.

Lesson Two: Take the necessary time to conduct an environmental scan that is both internal and external.

One of the best moments of the strategic planning process for me as the Vice President of Student Affairs was learning about what emerged from the work of two subcommittees of the steering group as they went on a deep dive of data and information to help inform the direction of the plan. The first “external” subcommittee conducted a review of best practices in strategic planning, the current literature on college cohorts and how their learning styles and needs will continue to change over the next 3 years, and examples of strategic planning within Student Affairs Divisions at other colleges and Universities. The second “internal” subcommittee conducted numerous focus groups, interviews, and surveys of our internal audiences including Divisional staff members, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty/staff. These data sets were then analyzed for themes and metaphors that could help the planning process focus on priorities. As it turns out, both of these subcommittees’ reports and Powerpoints became “deliverables” that I was able to share with the President’s Cabinet before the Strategic Plan would be developed.

Lesson Three: Expand/Retract, Repeat.

Over the course of the past year, one lesson really stands out in our strategic planning process – the need to consistently triangulate and verify the foci and direction of the planning process as it moves through iterations and refinements. We made a commitment to constantly surface the versions of our plan as we moved from mission and strategic directions to actual goals and objectives. Campus town halls were held for any campus community member to provide feedback, Divisional retreats utilized cross-functional teams to solicit reactions, and departmental huddles were held to receive pertinent responses. All along the way, the steering committee came back together to process what we heard in the large groups, challenge our assumptions, debate the use of certain words or terms, and do our best to make sure we were authentic stewards of the process. The result is that our strategic planning has taken a year, but we believe the final product will have the buy-in of the diversity of our Division as well as our stakeholders.

I am happy to get on the phone with any of you who might be considering a similar strategic planning process in the year ahead. Enjoy your summer!