Units’ goals will include how to measure progress
By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor 217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu
As the next step in the Strategic Planning process, colleges/units on the Urbana campus have identified their top five priorities for Fiscal Year 2008, which begins July 1, and are developing metrics for measuring their units’ progress toward their goals. And, for the first time, colleges/units will submit their goals and strategic initiatives to the Campus Budget Oversight Committee and link their resource requests accordingly. Chancellor Richard Herman’s Strategic Plan for the Urbana campus is organized around five key goals: leadership for the 21st century, academic excellence, breakthrough knowledge and innovation, transformative learning environment and providing access to the Illinois experience. Strategic initiatives to achieve those goals have been defined, as have 25 metrics for progress assessment and identification of barriers to be overcome. Graduation and retention rates are two of the five metrics that have been established for assessing progress toward the goal of leadership for the 21st century, and deferred maintenance levels and the percentage of class sections with less than 20 students are two metrics that have been established to measure progress toward creating a transformative learning environment (see sidebar for additional information – PDF FORMAT). Leaders of about 30 campus units have outlined their top five priorities for FY08, and using data such as student demographics and graduation and retention rates provided by the Office of the Provost, have proposed applicable metrics. “It’s a way to help operationalize and assess progress against their strategic plans,” said Stig Lanesskog, assistant provost for strategic planning and assessment. “We’re trying to develop consistency between the campus-level plan and the unit-level plans.” “Tying planning to implementation is really critical,” said Bruce Vojak, associate dean for external affairs in the College of Engineering, who coordinated the college’s planning process. “A number of organizations do a lot of planning and don’t implement; other places try to implement without planning. If we can do both, it will give us an advantage relative to many peer institutions.” The metrics are to be finalized by June 1. To aid in progress assessment, staff members in the Office of the Provost are gathering three to five years’ historical data for the metrics, a process that will be concluded by August for the campus-level metrics and by November for the college/unit-level metrics. A strategic planning and budget retreat is planned for May 11 and will include a poster session for units to share their goals, the strategic initiatives currently under way and key accomplishments or achievements that have occurred. “The whole strategic planning process has been very interesting to me, because it was the first time that I saw everything in one place that had been discussed over the eight years that I’ve been here,” Vojak said. “Over time, I see this as being an iterative process in which we continue to refine the goals and metrics to more concisely communicate them.” Funding for the strategic initiatives will come from a variety of sources, including reallocations, increases in grant and gift funding and targeted campuswide investments. President B. Joseph White, Herman, and chancellors Sylvia Manning and Richard Ringeisen, from the Chicago and Springfield campuses, respectively, will deliver their first annual reports about progress toward the goals in their strategic plans to the UI Board of Trustees in July. White first announced that the university and the three campuses would be developing strategic plans in 2005. Herman released a broadly defined strategic plan for the Urbana Campus in January 2006, followed by strategic plans for each college/unit in June. A refined version of the Urbana campus that provided more specificity was released in January 2007. More information on the strategic planning efforts at the Urbana campus is available at www.strategicplan.uiuc.edu and also can be accessed the campus’s home page.
