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With
a need to continue growing – adding courses, degrees,
departments, and schools to meet the ever-changing
expectations of incoming students - many colleges
have raised tuitions to cover funding gaps. This
oftentimes leads to criticism about the inability
of campuses to control their costs. In short, most
administrative leaders today are under increasing
pressure to simultaneously increase revenues, reduce
expenses, enhance quality, and boost their campus’
reputation.
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More
and more often, strategy development and planning
leads to difficult decisions about how to distribute
and manage scarce resources. The School of Engineering
wants a new graduate program in applied math and
statistics. The library needs funding for critical
acquisitions. The costs required to upgrade or update
aging infrastructures continues to grow. Staff salary
increases have been on hold for two years. The traditional
short term solutions – hiring freezes, expense deferrals,
and across-the-board cuts in department operating
budgets – have failed to reduce the pressure.
Some campuses are undertaking the difficult yet
rewarding task of carefully examining and prioritizing
all of their programs – academic and non-academic
– and making resource allocation decisions based
on the results. This requires, among other things,
a clear vision and strategy for the future of the
campus, disciplined and thoughtful planning and
analysis, consistent monitoring and regular review,
and possibly most important, conscious communication
with and tremendous cooperation from faculty, students,
and staff.
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At AVCOR, we help campus executives and administrators
address a wide variety of strategic issues, from
their organizations' most complex and challenging
opportunities to unit-level execution plans. The
types of work we do with clients includes, but
is not limited to:
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Defining, or
redefining, institutional strategy and vision
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Linking vision
to tangible objectives, goals and actions
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Organization
design and resource allocation |
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Portfolio and
unit positioning and restructuring |
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Strategic performance
measurement and management |
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Client Initiatives: |
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We supported
the development of a baseline plan - one portion
of an extensive strategic planning process
- for large university system that involved,
among other activities, conducting a comprehensive
series of SWOT analyses with a variety of
stakeholders ranging from students, faculty,
and alumni to Regents, system, and campus
leadership. |
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We helped
one client develop a methodology for evaluating
strategic objectives, creating organizational
measures, and implementing measurement collection
processes and tools. |
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We facilitated
a series of executive-level retreats for the
leadership team at a 17,000-student university
as a precursor to the introduction of a rigorous
strategic planning process. |
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