In this area, you will create a strategic plan that contains your institution’s strategic priorities and goals, align strategic goals to your learning and success outcomes, and run insight reports to demonstrate this alignment.
Tools for Strategic Planning Administrator
The Strategic Planning module enables the Strategic Planning administrator to:
- Create a Strategic Plan with priorities and subordinate goals
- Align strategic goals to learning and success outcomes within Planning and Self Study
- Run insight reports that show outcome progress for outcomes that are aligned to strategic plan goals
Strategic Planning Homepage
When the Strategic Planning administrator logs in, they see Strategic Plan in the side menu on the homepage. Once they are on the Strategic Plan page, they can create a Strategic Plan:
Creating Additional Strategic Plans
Administrators can create more than one Strategic Plan for the top level of the organization. If your institution has completed its Strategic Plan or is ready to begin a new one, you will be able to add the new Strategic Plan to the system, have other organizations map to that plan, and create tactics for the new Strategic Plan’s goals. Each Strategic Plan will be blank upon creation. You will need to create new Strategic Priorities, Strategic Goals, and Tactics for each new plan.
The option to create a new plan appears in the top right of the Strategic Plan homepage
Managing Strategic Plans
Aligning Reporting Years
Administrators can now align reporting years with the Strategic Plan, which creates a plan cycle. With the alignment of reporting years to the Strategic Plan, the administrators will see data specific to the reporting years selected in the plan on the Insights of the Strategic Plan.
In addition, the version of the outcomes being mapped to the Strategic Plan will be based on the reporting years tied to the Strategic Plan.
Define Years from the Define Years link
NOTE: For Strategic Plans published before the release of this feature, is Administrators edit the Strategic Plan, they will have to define a plan cycle.
Within a strategic plan, the strategic planning administrator will see the name of their strategic plan, any goals within the plan, and the icons to edit or manage your strategic plan:
Adding Strategic Priorities and Goals
After entering the Strategic Plan module and selecting Manage Strategic Plan, Strategic Priorities and Goals can be added by selecting the Plan Setup button.
From this area, Administrators can use the Create Strategic Priority and Create Strategic Goal buttons to create these items:
Administrators can also edit or delete Strategic Priorities and/or Goals, using the functions shown below. Priorities and Goals can also be re-arranged using the “Move Up” and “Move Down” functions.
Customizing Terminology
Administrators can customize Strategic Planning terminology by renaming the two object labels in Strategic Planning - Strategic Priority and Strategic Goals. Changing one or both terms to align with the terminology used on campus can be completed in the following manner:
- Go to Admin > Configuration Settings and click Strategic Planning Terminology
- By default, the terminology currently being used will be displayed in the dropdown. Users can choose to either select from a list of common alternative terms or enter their own custom term. The common terms available to choose from include Strategic Priority, Strategic Initiative, Strategic Objectives, and Strategic Goals.
- If the user chooses to Enter Custom Value, they must provide both the singular and plural forms for the term so that they can be presented correctly throughout the platform. Custom values can be added for either one or both levels, as needed.
- Selecting Save Terminology will result in the new values being reflected in all locations where the previous labels were displayed.
Add Tactics to Strategic Goals
Administrators can add Tactics to Strategic Goals within a Strategic Plan. A Tactic can be an action item, a trend, or a combination thereof, that shows progress on the Strategic Plan.
To add Tactics:
- Go to a Strategic Plan created in your system. Click Manage Strategic Plan > Click on a Strategic Goal for which you wish to add a Tactic. Click the ‘Add Tactic’ button.
Add Tactic button on a Strategic Goal card - Clicking the ‘Add Tactic’ button will open a side panel with the Tactic card fields. Here you can add Title, Status, Progress, and Budget for the Tactic. The Progress of the Tactic can be a value between 0-100. Similarly, the Budget requested must be a whole number. The currency value for the Budget request can be set from Admin > Configuration Settings > Budget Request. The currency value, if already selected for Actions in Assessment Planning, cannot be changed.
- Once all the fields are populated, users can click ‘Add Tactic’ to save the Tactic for the respective Strategic Goal. The saved Tactic will be available in the side panel as well as on the Goal card.
Added Tactic displayed on the Goal card and side panel - Users can also Edit or Delete a respective Tactic by clicking the ‘Edit’ or ‘Delete’ button on the Tactic card.
Edit and Delete button on the Tactic card
Once created, the full count of Tactics created for a Strategic Goal will be displayed on the Strategic Goal card, for quick reference.
Assign Tactics to Organizations
Administrators can assign the added Tactics to Organizations, allowing for collaboration with department, office, or other unit leads at the institution! Before, administrators could create and outline tactics for goals in their Strategic Plans, but these could not be shared with other stakeholders, namely leads/contributors at the institution. Now once they are assigned, leads will be able to update the status of an assigned tactic as well as provide updates on their progress. To do so, they can open an existing Tactic and edit it or assign it at the point a new Tactic is created. The Lead of the aligned organization will receive an email when the Tactic is assigned to an organization. A Tactic can only be assigned to a single organization at a given time.
NOTE: A Tactic can only be assigned to an organization to which the plan has been published.
NOTE: A Tactic can only be assigned to an organization to which the plan has been published.
Assign Organization link under the Tactic title
Email received by the Leads when a Tactic is assigned
Leads will see this Tactic(s) in the Strategic Plan available to them on the Org Card of the Home page. The Tactic will be available under the Strategic Goal for which it has been created.
Leads will see this Tactic(s) in the Strategic Plan available to them on the Org Card of the Home page. The Tactic will be available under the Strategic Goal for which it has been created.
Tactic available under the Strategic Goal
Leads can click on these Tactics and provide a status update on their progress. To do so, they can click the link of the Tactic and click Update Progress at the bottom of the side panel.
Update Progress button to add updates
Leads can add as many updates as they want to a single Tactic. Alongside adding Updates, they can edit the Progress %, the Tactic Status. Each update will be saved by the date on which it was added.
Leads can add as many updates as they want to a single Tactic. Alongside adding Updates, they can edit the Progress %, the Tactic Status. Each update will be saved by the date on which it was added.
View when adding an update
An update, once added, can be edited or deleted if the Lead wants to.
An update, once added, can be edited or deleted if the Lead wants to.
Add Supporting Documents to Strategic Plan Tactics
Contributors in departments, offices, or programs that have been assigned tactics in a Strategic Plan will be able to add supporting documents to their tactics updates. This will allow for storage and maintenance of relevant artifacts when it comes to tracking action items or trends being used to update the progress towards strategic plan goals. The functionality also includes the ability to download or delete evidence on the contributor side.
Add Evidence button under a Narrative
Administrator view of the Updates
Administrators can view the Updates added by Leads on their end of a Strategic Plan. Before, Administrators had to drill into the contributor view in order to see the updates that were added. Now they can see these updates and better understand progress within the area where they manage the Strategic Plan. They can view the added Evidences to each Narrative.
Since the evidence was added by the contributors, it is read only by administrators. They will need to download any added documents in order to view them.
Narrative added to the Tactic along with the Evidence document
Strategic Goal Alignment
Once strategic priorities and goals have been entered into the strategic plan, administrators can map their strategic goals to learning and success outcomes within Planning and Self Study.
Mapping Strategic Goals to Learning and Success Outcomes
To map a goal, select Map to the right of the strategic goal. From there, administrators will have the ability to select from learning and success outcomes built within the various hierarchical units of their institution. This screen will show what outcomes are already mapped to this strategic goal, as well the available outcomes for that unit of the hierarchy:
Administrators can map a strategic goal to multiple learning and success outcomes by selecting the checkbox for that outcome. Once this is done, the screen will reflect the mapping:
Once the mappings are completed for the strategic goal, select Done in the top right corner of the screen.
Mapping Organizational Outcomes to Strategic Plan
Organization Leads (e.g, department chairs) can map the outcomes of their organization to the Institutional Strategic Plan. In order to do so, Administrators need to publish the Strategic Plan to the desired organizations. This can be done from within the Strategic Plan by clicking the ‘Publish’ button.
Publish button displayed in the Strategic Plan panel
When clicking the Publish button, Administrators will have the entire hierarchy available and they can choose the organizations to which they want to publish the plan.
Organizational Hierarchy to choose from
Once the administrator publishes the plan, they will see the count of the organizations in the header – e.g. “Published to 2 Organizations”. They can also click and modify the choice of organizations selected as needed.
Count of Organizations displayed in the panel
Upon successful publishing of the Strategic Plan to the organizations, the leads of the selected organizations will have the Strategic Plan available under the My Leadership area on their Homepage upon login. They can also access the Strategic Plan from ‘In Progress’ projects.
Strategic Plan listed under My Leadership
When leads access the Strategic Plan, they will see the list of Strategic Priorities. Expanding an individual goal will fetch a list of the Strategic Goals that have been defined by the administrator in the Strategic Plan.
List of Strategic Goals and Priorities
Clicking the ‘+’ icon will open the outcome panel on the right-hand side and display the list of Learning and Success outcomes for that lead’s organization. If Administrator’s have established any mapping relationship before the Strategic Plan was published, the leads will see that mapping and be able to make adjustments or map additional outcomes.
List of organizational outcomes to map to
Insights Report
The strategic planning module contains an Insights report to show outcome progress for outcomes aligned to strategic goals within a strategic plan. This report is accessed by selecting the Insights tab:
The report will provide a graphical representation of outcome progress for the aligned strategic goals. This report can be filtered by the academic year in addition to goals within specified strategic priorities.
Administrators can now drill down into the Strategic Goals and view which organizational outcomes are aligned with them and view how those are performing. Each Strategic goal has four possible status: Not Started, In Progress, Met, and Not Met. Administrators can click on a status of the bar chart and to see the mapped outcomes for each of these statuses.
Administrators can click each respective area on the horizontal bar to view the outcomes for a respective status. Each status can be viewed separately. For each outcome, there is an associated Report which includes the assessment details of that outcome for a particular reporting year, including the measures, results, actions, and status for that outcome.
