Friday, August 31, 2018

Strategic Change Planning: The plan may only be as good as the process that created it



When seeking educational reform, strategic change planning should first seek to identify where the educational organization wants to be in the future and then determine how it will achieve established objectives and goals.  The planning process is the strategic attention to current changes in the organization, its external environment, and how these impact the organization’s current and future objectives.  The selection of a strategic planning model should minimally depend upon five considerations (McNamara, 2007):
  1. The purpose of strategic planning.
  2. The extent of prior planning done by the organization.
  3. The culture of the organization.
  4. The level of environmental change being experienced by the organization.
  5. The level of prior organizational success in planning.
A comprehensive view of strategic management by an organization’s leadership is possible by accessing information systems.  The balanced scorecard (Norton & Kaplan, 2016) is an important element for optimizing a comprehensive system for strategic change.  The balanced scorecard is meant to measure financial, marketing, production, organizational development, and new product development factors so the organization’s senior managers can achieve a holistic perspective and thereby plan more effectively.
Norton and Kaplan (2016) assert the following four steps must be part of the balanced scorecard design process:
  1. Translate the vision into operational goals.;
  2. Communicate the vision and link it to individual performance.
  3. Begin business planning and index setting
  4. Review feedback and learning and then adjust the strategy accordingly


      The steps extend beyond simply identifying financial and non-financial measures.  The balanced scorecard is intended to illustrate and consider the design process within broader thinking about how the results can be integrated with the wider business management process.  Other than improving the focus of management and change agents, the balanced scorecard (Norton & Kaplan, 2016) has no direct role in the formation of strategy.  One benefit of the balanced scorecard model is that it can effectively co-exist with strategic planning systems or other tools that support strategic change.

      Many educational institutions that need reform utilize a Situational Leadership Approach.  However, too often senior leadership using a Situational Leadership Approach to implement change initiatives involving enrollment and academic support requirements result to top-down plan for initiation that results in less effective communication and processes that fail to develop an inter-department coalition that intentionally invites effective and efficient changes.  Arguably, by their nature, educational institutions are staffed by a highly-trained, educated workforce.  This means the staff profile of most educational organizations is similar compared to the sample of the Fernandez and Vecchio (1997) study.  Given results of that study, Northouse (2018) suggested the Situational Leadership Approach may yield ineffective results for organizations with similar staff profiles. 

      An educational organization might integrate a scenario model to identify strategic issues and then implement an issues-based model to address issues for reaching the goals (McNamara, 2007).  The Alignment Model would effectively ensure strong alignment between an educational organization’s mission and its resources to effectively operate the institution.  McNamara (2007) posits this model is useful for organizations that need to identify why strategies are not working and to fine tune them for optimal effectiveness.  Another use for this model is if the educational organization is experiencing a large number of issues around internal efficiencies.  In such cases, a planning group should be identified to consider the following overall steps within the Alignment Model:
  • Outline the organization’s mission, programs, resources, and needed support.
  • Identify what’s working well and what needs adjustment.
  • Identify how these adjustments should be made.
  • Include the adjustments as strategies in the strategic plan.


When senior leadership uses a more inviting leadership style to implement the tenets of the Alignment Model, issues such as, for example, admission rates and student retention problems can be effectively addressed.  Through the utilization of an invitational leadership style and implementation of the Alignment Model, the subsequent exhibition of intentional care, optimism, respect, and trust (I-CORT) (Purkey & Novak, 2016), resulted in more effective communication and coalition building whereby Freshman class retention increased by nearly 20% at one eastern private college the year following implementation of the strategic change plan. 
Regardless of the selected strategic change model, the educational organization must also seek to implement a culture of high expectations.  When the learning for all mission (Lezotte & Snyder, 2011) is reinforced by Invitational Theory and Practice (Purkey & Novak, 2016), utilization of any strategic change model should be more successful.  For any project involving an area of concern within an educational organization, the strategic change planning process should include analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT).  The following outline addresses steps in this process:
  1. Conduct an environmental scan that identifies possible opportunities and potential threats.
  2. Take a hard look at what's going on with all involved internal and external stakeholders, seeking to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and potential threats.
  3. Establish a collective statement of mission and a clearly explicated vision aligned with the educational organization’s values. 
  4. Establish non-negotiable goals to accomplish over the next three years based on what is happening inside and outside the educational organization. 
  5. Identify how the explicated goals will be achieved.  This will require identification of strategies, objectives, responsibilities and timelines.
Given strategic planning is designed to guide the direction and goals of the change initiative, the strategic planning process should thereby influence numerous actions involving the educational organization.  These may include:
  1. Identify the needed services for success.  Essential to this is the communication network between stakeholders. 
  2. Design a plan for “success” that delineates roles for all stakeholders.
  3. Establish performance goals for members of the educational organization and its students.   
  4. Create ad hoc committees to identify possible solutions to the threats identified in the SWOT analysis (Jyothi, Babu, & Krishna, 2008).
  5. Identify how to optimize established resources and potential supports or opportunities based on the SWOT analysis.  Part of this process is to identify what resources are needed to achieve identified goals and understand how much money would be needed to solidify or procure those resources.  In this way the established goals determine the various budgetary line items.
Two key points to remember while considering any change initiative are:
  1. The planning process is at least as important as the planning document itself.
  2. The planning process should never be considered complete.  Rather, the planning process should be a continuous cycle that's part of the management process itself based on the belief that if better is possible then good is not enough (Kezar, 2001).
While the focus of organizational change is considered most effective if mandated from upper management, Huy and Mintzberg (2003) believe such a perspective must be mitigated through an embracing of effective organizational change that is both organic and systematic.  Strategic change planning first identifies where the organization wants to be in the future and then determines how it will achieve established objectives and goals.  The planning process is the strategic attention to current changes in the organization, its external environment, and how these impact the organization’s current and future objectives. 

To cite:
Anderson, C.J. (August 31, 2018) Strategic Change Planning: The plan may only be as good as the
process that created it. [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/ 
 
References:

Fernandez, C. F., & Vecchio, R. P. (1997). Situational leadership theory revisited: A test of an
across jobs perspective. Leadership Quarterly, 8(1), 67.
 
Huy, O. N., & Mintzberg, H. (2003). The rhythm of change. MIT Sloan Management Review,
44(4), 79.
 
Johnson, M. W. (2010). Seizing the white space: Business model innovation for growth and

                renewal, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press

 
Jyothi, B., Babu, G., & Krishna, I. (2008). Object oriented and multi-scale image
                analysis: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats - A review.
Journal of Computer Science, 4(9), 706-712.
 
Kezar, A. (2001). Organizational models and facilitators of change: Providing a
framework for student and academic affairs collaboration. New Directions in
Higher Education, 116, 63–74. 
 
Lezotte, L. W., & Snyder, K. M. (2011). What effective schools do: Re-envisioning the  
correlates. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press. 
 
McNamara, C. (2007). Long-lasting solutions in professional & organizational development
                Minneapolis, MN: Authenticity Consulting
 
Northouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, Inc. ISBN: 978-1-4129-7488-2.
 
Norton, D. P., & Kaplan, R. S. (2016). Balanced Scorecard. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of
                    Strategic Management, 1–5. doi:10.1057/978-1-349-94848-2_683-1
 
Purkey, W. W., & Novak, J.M. (2016). Fundamentals of invitational education (2nd ed). The
International Alliance for Invitational Education. Retrieved from: 
 




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