2. About SCUP
The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) is a community that provides its
members with knowledge and resources on best planning practices and emerging trends in
higher education, with a particular focus on the integration of academic, facilities, infrastructural,
financial, resource, and strategic planning.
Founded in 1965, the society is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
For more information, visit www.scup.org.

4. A Guide to Planning for Change ........................
Table of Contents
Introduction to A Guide to Planning for Change ...................... 1
Guiding Planners and Strategists Toward Success ......................... 3
Snapshots of Today’s Planners and Strategists ................................ 4
A Guide to Planning for Change ...................................................... 10
Integrated, Strategic, Aligned Planning ...................................... 13
The Characteristics of Successful Planners and
Successful Planning ..................................................................... 14
Integrated Planning ............................................................................. 17
Strategic Planning ............................................................................... 17
Aligned Planning ................................................................................. 23
A Model for Strategic Planning and
Executing Strategy ................................................................................ 33
Strategic Planning ................................................................................ 36
Execution of Strategy Within the Institutional Context ............... 38
Measure, Model, and Intervene ........................................................ 39
Assessing Planning Opportunities ............................................... 41
Developing a Strategy for Planning ................................................. 41
A Checklist for Analyzing Planning and
Strategy-Setting Environments .................................................. 44
Crafting a Strategy for Planning ....................................................... 48
The Politics of Planning for Change ............................................. 49
Politics and Power in Higher Education ......................................... 49
Planning for Change ........................................................................... 51
Communicating Vision and Strategy ............................................... 62
Changing Perspectives and Tools in Planning ....................... 63
Eras in Planning and Decision Making ........................................... 64
The World View and Toolkit of
Today’s Planners and Strategists .............................................. 72
..................................

5. ..................................
New Directions in Planning Topics ............................................... 75
Sustainability ........................................................................................ 75
Academic Planning, Innovation, and Leadership ......................... 77
New and Enhanced Learning Environments ................................. 77
Student Services and New Student Experiences ........................... 77
Strategic Enrollment Management ................................................... 78
Analytics and Measuring and Improving Performance ............... 78
Integrated Planning and Assessment .............................................. 79
Management of Space ......................................................................... 79
Campus Master Planning and Facilities Planning ......................... 79
Technology Infrastructure .................................................................. 79
Resource Planning, Allocation, and Budgeting ............................. 80
Human Resources Planning .............................................................. 80
Continuous Process Improvement in Higher Education ............. 81
Institutional Advancement and Capital Campaign
Planning ......................................................................................... 81
The New Politics of Planning ............................................................ 81
Economic Development ...................................................................... 81
Going Global: Planning for International Contexts ...................... 82
Leading Planning and Change .......................................................... 82
Transforming Research, Knowledge Networks,
and Scholarship ............................................................................ 83
Transformational Change That Matters .......................................... 84
Core Readings and Resources ....................................................... 85
The Influence of Other Fields on
Higher Education Planning ........................................................ 85
A Critical Reading List for Planning in Higher Education .......... 90
Critical Resources Annotations ......................................................... 96
Online Repository of Resources....................................................... 118
Developing the Competencies of
Planners and Strategists .................................................................. 119
Career Paths of Planners and Strategists........................................ 120
Developing the Competencies of
Planners and Strategists ............................................................ 127
Summary of Resources for
Planners and Strategists ...............................................................129
Summary of Online Resources ................................................ 129
Annotations of Critical Resources .......................................... 130
Text References in Addition to Critical Resources ............... 130
..................................

6. A Guide to Planning for Change ........................
Society for College and University Planning
339 E. Liberty Street, Suite 300
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104
Phone: 734.998.7832
Fax: 734.998.6532
Web: www.scup.org
© 2008 by the Society for College and University Planning
All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-9820229-0-5
..................................

7. ..................................
Foreword
One wonders if it is really possible to lead a college or university through the challenges created
by globalism, technology, accountability, and other forces driving change. These leadership
challenges are further complicated by academe’s historical internal contradictions—the tug of the
status quo as the preservers of knowledge but also the drive to new ground as the centers of
discovery; the pull toward the perennialism built into its DNA but also the push to pragmatism
to address contemporary issues and opportunities.
Some would describe a college or university as being like a helicopter: If you look at the odd
assembly of parts and pieces objectively, you would have to conclude that it could never fly. Yet,
by combining the forces of roaring winds blowing down and sideways with a schooled hand
controlling speed and tilt, it not only flies, but does so with incredible maneuverability.
Leaders who successfully guide these forces and take their institutions to a higher plane do so
through a unique, almost magical, combination of art, science, politics, psychology, and, most
would admit, good fortune. And whether it is formal, informal, or called something else in their
minds, all are engaged, at some level, in strategic planning, the execution of strategy, and the
development of organizational capacity and culture to make it all work.
For the past quarter century, Don Norris and Nick Poulton’s book A Guide for New Planners has
been a primary resource for both new and experienced planners—a primer for entrants into the
field and a touchstone and tool for veterans who are establishing and attempting to draw their
colleagues into an institutional planning process. For those of us who have been engaged in
planning through many positions over our careers, it is one of the most highlighted, dog-eared,
and borrowed books in our libraries.
In this new book, A Guide to Planning for Change, Norris and Poulton combine the practical
insights of their earlier work with the future vision and insight of Transforming Higher Education:
A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, another SCUP best seller. Their new book takes the
reader back through the history of planning and strategy execution in higher education by
outlining its many eras and stages of development; highlights the latest thinking and writing on
the topic; summarizes the new and emerging challenges facing leaders of colleges and
universities; and discusses new techniques and tools (most notably, analytics) to create an
enhanced model for planning in higher education. This model recognizes the many internal,
external, up, down, and sideways forces, challenges, and opportunities facing higher education
and that, ultimately, it is the successful, expeditionary execution of strategy that will have a
lasting impact on the institution.
This book is complemented by a trove of online resources that will be refreshed to maintain the
currency of its insights, providing practitioners with a dependable, comprehensive guide in their
efforts to plan for change.
Sal D. Rinella, 2008–2009 SCUP President
Strategic Consultant, STRATUS, a Division of Heery International, Inc.
..................................

8. A Guide to Planning for Change ........................
Acknowledgements
A Guide to Planning for Change owes a debt of gratitude to the legion of practitioners and
authors who have contributed to the body of knowledge for planning, strategic management, and
organizational development. These giants in our field are identified in the bibliographic
references included in Figure 8.1 on pages 91–95.
In particular, we are distinctly thankful for the work of the faculty and staff of the SCUP Planning
Institute, especially Phyllis Grummon, whose work has been incorporated in this book. Their
contribution is most prominent in Chapter 5, The Politics of Planning for Change and in Chapter
3, A Model for Strategic Planning and Executive Strategy.
We appreciate the willingness of 10 friends and members of SCUP to share their personal sagas
with us and to be featured in descriptions of the career paths of planners in Chapter 9. Thanks to
Helen Giles-Gee, Scott V. Cole, Jake Julia, Arthur J. Lidsky, Jennifer Spielvogel, Simone
Himbeault Taylor, Mary Sapp, Pamela J. Stewart, Joan Racki, and Nick Santilli for their efforts.
We also thankfully acknowledge the contribution of the 26 authors who have contributed
chapters to the online companion book, New Directions in Planning Topics. These expert
practitioners have agreed to periodically update these chapters, providing a useful mechanism
for keeping this work fresh. These authors are listed in Figure 7.1 on page 76.
The underwriters of this initiative have made it possible for us to create a world-class printed
publication and a trove of online resources that will be refreshed. These corporations are
described in the following pages, and we wish to acknowledge our appreciation for their
commitment to advancing the practice of planning, analytics, and capacity building in higher
education.
A Guide to Planning for Change has benefited from the editorial and substantive contribution of
a small core of advisors. Phil Taylor has served as designer and graphics artist from the very start
of the initiative. Carolyn Norris provided editorial and document management support. Joan
Leonard has been instrumental in offering commentary and editorial support from the beginning
of the initiative and has contributed to the forging of relationships with the underwriters. Critical
feedback has been incorporated from Linda Baer, Sam Kirkpatrick, Martha Hesse, Paul Lefrere,
and Ann Kenworthy. Susan Poulton has advised us on Web-based marketing, advertising, and
relationship building to advance this initiative. Kimberly Maas provided copy-editing services.
Finally, Terry Calhoun of SCUP has been a champion of this initiative from the start and has
contributed substantially in innumerable ways. We also salute and appreciate the support of
Jolene Knapp, Executive Director of SCUP, and the entire SCUP staff, both past and present, who
have supported the creation of A Guide for New Planners and its evolution into A Guide to
Planning for Change, a journey that has spanned over 25 years.
..................................

9. ..................................
Authors
Donald M. Norris
President, Strategic Initiatives, Inc.
www.strategicinitiatives.com
dmn@strategicinitiatives.com
703.450.5255
Dr. Norris is well known as a planner, strategist, thought leader, researcher, and consultant. He
and Nick Poulton co-authored A Guide for New Planners (1991), which aided a generation of
planners in higher education. He has authored a number of publications on transformation for
the Society for College and University Planning. His book, Transforming Higher Education: A
Vision for Learning in the 21st Century (1995), was instrumental in providing a framework for
advancing the concept of transformative e-learning in the late 1990s. Transforming e-Knowledge: A
Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge (2003) heralded the arrival of the transformative generation
of Web services, social networking, and knowledge-sharing capabilities. Dr. Norris consults on
planning, executing strategy, and developing organizational capacity with a wide range of
colleges and universities, corporations, professional societies and associations, and other
nonprofits. His recent work on action analytics is enabling colleges and universities to change
decision-making behavior; build cultures of performance measurement and improvement; and
align institutional strategies, actions, and metrics.
Nick L. Poulton
President Emeritus, Texas International Education Consortium (TIEC)
poultontexas@aol.com
512.762.6129
Dr. Poulton’s career has spanned 40 years as a faculty member, researcher, planner, and
consultant. He has served in administrative and planning posts in a variety of American and
international institutions and as a consultant for institutions across the globe. As president of the
Texas International Education Consortium (TIEC), he marshaled the intellectual resources of
Texas public universities to provide consulting, language training, and professional development
experiences for international colleges and universities. He and Don Norris co-authored A Guide
for New Planners (1991) and their professional collaboration on a wide range of consulting and
thought leadership projects spans 35 years. Dr. Poulton continues an active international
consulting practice.
..................................

10. A Guide to Planning for Change ........................
Underwriters
Microsoft, Inc.
www.microsoft.com/education/solutions/bihighered.aspx
Microsoft is the world leader in providing software plus services in the high-tech industry.
Microsoft continues to demonstrate its commitment to working with educators, educational
organizations and industry partners to expand the world of learning through affordable, user-
friendly technology. Microsoft is leading the way in providing “business intelligence for the
masses” using the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) for Higher Education solution. This
provides an intuitive and cost-effective way to enable users at all levels of expertise to access and
analyze information through familiar tools such as a Web browser, Microsoft Office Excel, and
Microsoft Office SharePoint. It also provides access to sophisticated BI tools at costs that
institutions can afford. By providing ready access to relevant data from virtually any source,
Microsoft products and services enable, planners, strategists, and decision makers to inform
decisions and actions by tracking and aligning progress against key performance indicators
(KPIs), strategies, goals, and responsibilities.
The Sextant Group
www.TheSextantGroup.com
The Sextant Group, Inc. is the premier provider of leading-edge planning and systems design for
institutional, educational and corporate environments demanding a high level of technology.
Dedicated to planning, strategy and capacity building, the company supports architects and
institutions world-wide with demonstrated expertise in audiovisual and information
technologies, physical security and acoustics, applicable to both facility renovation and new
design. Mark Valenti, CTS, President of The Sextant Group, is an internationally-recognized
authority and thought leader in the industry. His areas of expertise include audiovisual
technologies, market trends, and the impact of the diffusion of learning and other academic
functions beyond the traditional campus. Valenti and Don Norris have collaborated in an on-
going seminar series for the academic community addressing planning issues for individual
facilities and campus master planning in the face of mobility-enabling technology. The Sextant
Group has consulted for hundreds of campuses around the globe, spanning North America from
Harvard to Stanford, plus institutions from Asia to Europe.
..................................

11. ..................................
Nuventive, Inc.
www.nuventive.com
Nuventive has been a trailblazer in the development of leading-edge assessment management,
alignment, and portfolio tools in higher education. It has over 250 college and university
customers and has users in the United States, Canada, Australasia, and Western Europe. In
collaboration with its industry partners, Nuventive has worked with institutions to co-create
solutions that manage paperless processes for strategic planning, administrative and facilities
planning, sustainability, accreditation, assessment, and program review. These solutions can be
used to assign, track, and monitor responsibilities at every stage of planning, accreditation,
assessment, and other processes. They also enable practitioners to align all of these processes
with institutional strategies, goals, actions, and measures. Nuventive’s products and services are
a key element of the combination of alignment and analytics solutions needed to support
integrated, strategic, aligned planning.
iStrategy
www.istrategysolutions.com
iStrategy is the leading provider of higher education analytic reporting. Its HigherEd Analytics
Suite™ integrates with leading ERP vendors, including Oracle/PeopleSoft, SunGard/Banner and
Datatel, enabling colleges and universities to build robust dimensional data warehouses in weeks
instead of years. Its application provides intuitive, secure, self-service reporting for student,
financial, advancement and human resources information. These solutions deliver analytics to
the desktop of both power users and non-technical functional users, providing “analytics for the
masses.” iStrategy is a key player in the emerging analytics, alignment, and presentation
environment needed to support planning, strategy, and capacity building in higher education.
eThority
www.ethority.com/higher_ed
eThority Enterprise Edition combines powerful data analysis and presentation tools that fuse the
user friendliness of desktop applications with the power of traditional enterprise business
intelligence tools. eThority enables organizations to create a “single source of truth,” seamlessly
linking data from ERP systems, data warehouses, departmental or specialty applications, and
shadow systems. Through the “user-obvious” interface, administrators, faculty and staff are able
to make sense of their operational data, see the “big picture” for performance improvement and
strategic planning, and portray trends and complex relationships that are best understood
through visualization. The eThority Enterprise Edition platform provides data modeling,
analytics, advanced visualization and specialized higher education functions like commitment
management—for the masses.
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12. A Guide to Planning for Change ........................
..................................

13. Introduction to
A Guide to Planning for Change
This book is a guide to planning, executing strategy, and developing the organizational capacity
of colleges and universities. It is about making sense of changing conditions and achieving
strategic intent in the face of competition, uncertainty, and politics.
Planning is a core competency of successful organizations, leaders, and managers. It pervades all
organizational units and processes. Higher education planning in all its forms engages a broad
cross section of administrative leaders, staff, faculty, students, alumni, and other stakeholders.
Planning is ongoing, on different time frames and schedules.
Strategic thinking is reflected in the crafting and executing of strategy. Strategies express an
organization’s intent for the future through clear vision, considered decisions, and purposeful
initiatives. Strategies can be incorporated into plans and budgets that are updated annually and
adjusted even more frequently. The ability to execute strategy in a flexible, expeditionary manner
has become an essential competency for leaders at all levels.
The capacity to successfully plan and execute strategy at all levels of the organization requires a
new generation of user-friendly metrics and analytics. Performance metrics are appearing on the
desktops of planners, strategists, and decision makers at all levels from executives to front-line
staff and faculty. This emerging generation of affordable, intuitive metrics is enabling institutions
to measure and communicate progress in executing strategies, build organizational capacity, and
hold staff and faculty responsible for improving performance.
Successful leaders use strategies to frame the need for change and to develop their organization’s
capacity to prosper in a changing and competitive environment. Organizational capacity involves
(1) leadership; (2) facility, technology, and equipment infrastructures; (3) program offerings and
knowledge-discovery capacity; (4) values, skills, and competencies of administrators, faculty,
researchers, staff, and students; (5) academic and administrative processes; and (6) organizational
culture. In the process of planning and crafting strategy, the institution discovers how it must
improve its organizational capacity in order to thrive.
The interconnectedness of planning, strategy execution, and organizational capacity is illustrated
in figure 1.1.
................................. 1

14. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
Colleges and universities have traditionally worked to expand the boundaries of knowledge and
discover new ways of “knowing.” Concurrently, they have served a critical role in conserving
traditional values and proven practices. Often these roles of disruption and conservation collide,
sometimes dramatically. Today, such collisions are common throughout higher education,
presenting challenges and opportunities for planners and strategists.
In recent years, colleges and universities have used information and communications technology
to transform how leading-edge scholarship is practiced in most disciplines. The patterns and
cadences of the research, dissemination, and engagement of new knowledge have accelerated
and changed profoundly. In teaching and learning, however, the increasing use of technology has
generally had a less dramatic impact. Yet, the transformative power of technology is visible in
those institutions creating dramatically different approaches to accelerated learning for adult
learners and in those institutions and workforce training programs positioned to provide
affordable education for the masses around the world. As Gibson (1984) observed in
Neuromancer, “The future is already here; it is just not distributed very well.”
Digitization, globalization, and democratization of the learning and knowledge industry are
changing the very nature of how knowledge is created, shared, and experienced. In The World Is
Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Friedman (2006) described the pervasive impact of
these forces on every institution, enterprise, and individual in the global economy. These forces
2 .................................

15. ....................... A Guide to Planning for Change
are changing the nature of learning and the perspectives, skills, and competencies required to be
successful throughout life. They are also reshaping the relationships and transitions between
learning and work. As a result, the nature of the challenges facing planners and strategists and
the tools and techniques of practice are profoundly changing as well.
The very face of higher education is being transformed by new challenges and opportunities.
Innovative partnerships in the knowledge industry have brought together new constellations of
collaborators, competitors, and co-creators. Over time, these partnerships will create new, more
affordable models and options for learning, competency building, and refreshment. While
accountability pressures from outside higher education have focused attention on the need to
demonstrate performance and improve affordability, new generations of open-architecture
analytics are deploying Web 2.0 practices to help institutions measure and improve these areas.
These trends likely will grow in importance over time.
Taken together, these forces are compelling colleges, universities, and other learning enterprises
around the world to revisit their values and their value propositions. Some are reaffirming and
incrementally updating existing principles and practices. Others are considering truly dramatic
changes to remain vibrant, competitive, and sustainable.
In the midst of these efforts are the administrators, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders across
the spectrum of higher education who are involved in planning, executing strategy, and building
organizational capacity so their institutions will thrive in the face of competition, uncertainty,
and change. This book is written for them.
Guiding Planners and Strategists Toward Success
This book’s purpose is to assist higher education planners and strategists in guiding their
institutions toward success. This is not a “cookbook” on how to plan by the numbers. So-called
“prescriptive planning models”—those that assume perfectly rational decision making and pay
inadequate attention to environmental differences—suggest lockstep approaches to planning,
strategy crafting, and implementation. Such approaches to formulaic strategic planning have
been discredited in both the corporate world and other settings, as reflected in the title of
Mintzberg’s (1994) book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.
But the rumors of the death of strategic planning were premature. Strategic planning has made a
comeback by bringing flexibility, elegance, and simplicity back to the formulation of strategy. It
has attained new respectability by focusing on strategies and decisions, not plans, and by
emphasizing the expeditionary nature of strategy execution.
This book is a road map guiding the planning and execution of strategy. It is intended to help
higher education planners of all kinds and at all levels determine how their activities fit into the
greater ecology of planning and strategy at their institutions or in other settings. Because
successful planning is both art and science, this book is intended to help planners develop
personal strategies for their own particular planning activities, supported by a new generation of
................................. 3

16. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
quantitative measurement and qualitative assessment tools, applications, and practices. In
addition, we offer suggestions to guide planners in locating relevant resources and assistance
when needed to formulate questions and answers about planning.
More than 30 years ago, Enarson (1975) coined an apt metaphor for planning. He rejected the
traditional “Cook’s Tour” model in favor of a “Lewis and Clark” model. The Cook’s Tour
describes a precise schedule on a well-defined route; it moves in an orderly progression past
known landmarks. Its aim is to avoid contingencies and the unknown and to structure planning
in a scheduled, orderly, and routine manner. Conversely, the Lewis and Clark model
incorporates a sense of adventure in the exploration of new planning frontiers. Lewis and Clark
had a clear sense of context, direction, and ultimate destination, but their actual course was
unknown. The Cook’s Tour model gives the false impression of stability, while the Lewis and
Clark model suggests values, perspectives, and principles that enable the planner to deal with the
uncertainty and unpredictability of planning.
The Lewis and Clark model also conveys the expeditionary spirit of planning and strategy
execution, which require the capacity to rethink and revise in the face of ever-changing
conditions and to lead organizations in navigating the shoals of uncertainty and developing new
adaptive capacities.
Snapshots of Today’s Planners and Strategists
The following scenarios are snapshots of the many roles, responsibilities, and perspectives of
college and university planners in today’s higher education environment.
The new president at your regional state university has elevated you from assistant to the
president to director of planning with instructions to frame and support a strategic planning
process. The former president had successfully led the growth of the university for over 20
years by seizing opportunities and “did not believe in strategic planning.” Your new
president is recognized as an experienced leader and planner, and she has shared with you a
variety of planning frameworks. However, she is counting on you to help evaluate the
institution’s readiness for planning and to collaborate with her in framing a process that will
aggressively develop organizational capacity to plan effectively over time.
4 .................................

17. ....................... A Guide to Planning for Change
As retiring vice president for student affairs, you have been designated to chair your
university’s upcoming regional accreditation process. The last process was an administrative
nightmare, resulting in a number of corrective actions that proved difficult to execute and
monitor. The president has directed you to work with the provost and chief information
officer to develop a paperless accreditation process, accessible to every authorized participant.
It is to be seamlessly connected to the university’s continuous improvement efforts, its first-
generation executive dashboard, and its strategic and operational planning processes
The president of your private university has just added his name to the list of signatories to
the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. At the most recent
meeting of the president’s cabinet, he announced his dissatisfaction with the scope and
penetration of campus sustainability efforts and declared that next month’s cabinet retreat
would focus on that issue. The goal of the retreat will be to craft a strategy for building
sustainability into all institutional planning and operational processes. Further, the working
session will result in draft sustainability performance measures for each cabinet executive
officer that can be translated into performance expectations for their subordinates.
As director of facilities planning, you are coordinating a program planning committee for a
new building for biology, chemistry, psychology, and environmental studies. The provost and
president have reviewed the initial program plan and have characterized it as an “elegant
extrapolation of our existing departmental approaches to the sciences.” You have been
instructed to work with the provost to reconfigure or relaunch the planning team process. You
................................. 5

18. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
are to select new benchmarking projects and consulting support, if necessary. Your goal is to
develop a program plan for a flexible, multidisciplinary facility that will support collaborative
research and learning over a 50-year life, accommodating 10 to 15 major technology changes
during that time period.
The statewide system of community colleges has made a commitment to improving the
linkages among learning, workforce preparation, and jobs. As director of business and
industry partnerships, you have been asked to participate in a cross-enterprise task force to
share knowledge resources among pre-K–12 schools, community colleges and other
postsecondary educational institutions, state workforce organizations, and employers. In
addition, your chancellor has directed you, the provost, and the chief information officer to
develop dashboards and supporting analytics on workforce readiness, transitions between
learning and work, and competencies required by employers.
As the newly elevated vice president for finance and operations, you have been dissatisfied
with the execution of institutional strategies and initiatives. With each successive strategic
planning cycle, you have seen sound strategies fail because they were poorly aligned with
operational and budgetary planning. These strategies disappeared into “fairy dust” by the
time they filtered down to individual college and departmental plans and priorities. In your
first operational and budgetary planning cycle, you have the opportunity to clearly align
institutional strategies with the strategies, goals, activities, and measurements at the operating
unit level.
Your state has experienced a severe budget crisis as a result of a recent economic downturn.
Your public university has been instructed to prepare for an immediate reduction of three
percent in this year’s operating budget, to be effective by mid-year, and a reduction of an
additional five percent in next year’s budget. As the vice president for planning and budget,
the president has charged you to partner with the provost to plan for both sets of reductions.
In addition, in the second year you are expected to combine budgetary reductions with a
serious scrutiny of administrative processes and academic services.
Under your leadership as chief information officer, your metropolitan university has
progressively deployed a campuswide wireless capability, which has tangibly changed the
patterns of mobility, interactivity, and collaboration on campus. Over the past year, you have
been working with a metropolitan task force to extend the wireless capability of your campus
across your metropolitan region. Today, the president appointed you to a three-person
strategic thinking group to develop ways to infuse new patterns of collaboration and
interactivity into new facilities design (three new buildings currently in planning) and into the
10-year-old campus master plan now due for an update.
The president has appointed you, the vice president of human resources, to play a primary
role in supporting the implementation of the university’s just-completed strategic plan. Your
role is to develop and execute a change management initiative focused on strengthening the
capacity of individuals, teams, departments, and organizations to accept and navigate change.
This will include leadership development at the grassroots level designed to prepare
individuals across the university to embrace and actively participate in change.
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19. ....................... A Guide to Planning for Change
For many years, your university has been known for its commitment to study-abroad
programs, international studies, and other global learning initiatives. Last week, the provost
designated you as vice provost for international programs. Your initial priority assignment is
to develop and execute a strategy and transparent methodology for evaluating prospective
global opportunities and relationships. Your first test case will be evaluating three existing
proposals/opportunities to establish campuses in Abu Dhabi, Chennai, and/or Shanghai.
You have been hired as vice president of enrollment services at a large public university.
Retention of at-risk students is a problem. Your charge is to introduce a formal program of
strategic enrollment management supported by state-of-the-art analytics to enable your staff
to dynamically identify and monitor at-risk students, generate alerts to appropriate staff and
departments when students are in jeopardy, and intervene in real time.
Your public university is located in a hypergrowth metropolitan region in the southwest. In
addition to the original research-oriented campus, three branch campuses have been
established over the past 15 years, which you coordinate in your role as vice president for
regional campuses. A fourth branch campus setting is being considered. The provost has
asked you to chair a “distributed university task force” to revisit the issue of the proper roles,
structures, and relationships among the campuses. You are to visit other benchmark
institutions, conduct a comparative analysis, and recommend a comprehensive strategy that
will optimally leverage the university’s resources and maximize the university’s service to
and competitive position within the state.
Your community college is part of a multicampus system of comprehensive universities and
technical/community colleges with formalized strategic planning and operational planning
processes. As vice president of strategic operations, you are coordinating your campus
strategic planning process to ensure that your goals, activities, and measures align with the
strategic directions and measures of the system. In your most recent planning process, you are
working with a multidimensional planning team to create strategy maps consisting of 14 goals
and related measures that align with the four strategic directions and eight key performance
indicators (KPIs) of the system plan.
Underneath these snapshots of institutional planning and strategy-setting activities lives a
pervasive constellation of academic planning and strategy-setting practices. Every day, deans,
department chairs, faculty members, and researchers engage in continuous cycles of planning for
curriculum, course offerings, research agendas, and knowledge-creation strategies. Individual
academics, informal working groups, formal committees, teams, and departments plan for the
future and execute these plans to strengthen the academic lifeblood of the institution. These
efforts generate academic strategies, incentives for innovation, the capacity to take advantage of
serendipitous opportunities, and the will to face unforeseen challenges and changing conditions.
Robust academic planning, innovation, and capacity building are essential to successful
institutional planning and strategy execution.
In each of these scenarios, someone has been asked either to plan, or to play a role in support of a
planning and strategy-setting process, or to align their work and planning activities with other
................................. 7

20. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
organizational planning processes, strategies, and outcomes. Planning in colleges and
universities is a complex, pervasive ecology of interconnected activities.
Planning is primarily a line function, a fundamental responsibility of academic and
administrative managers at all levels. It is a mindset, an approach to confronting the future in a
way that establishes and executes the institution’s strategic intent. Planning is also a staff
function, performed by staff members with the word “planning” in their titles. But planning staff
are really coordinators, facilitators, and enablers. The real heavy lifting in planning is performed
by academic and administrative leaders and managers who use planning to frame decisions and
execute strategies within their areas of responsibility.
Scope and Concepts: Planning, Strategy Execution, and Change
Over the years, planning practitioners have reshaped the definition and concepts of planning,
strategy execution, and organizational development and change as summarized in figure 1.2.
Principles for Success
Figure 1.3 summarizes a set of principles that can serve as a compass to guide planners and
strategists toward successfully positioning their institutions for change. These principles have
been distilled from years of successful practice, and the mindsets, methodologies, frameworks,
and resources cited throughout this book reflect these principles.
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21. ....................... A Guide to Planning for Change
The Importance of Institutional Context
In considering the scenarios described in the snapshots of today’s planners and strategists, the
importance of context cannot be overemphasized. Each institutional planning and strategy-
setting activity is shaped by a distinctive set of challenges, conditions, and history. In
understanding context, the following generic contextual factors are particularly important:
Institutional complexity. The nature and complexity of an institution’s mission profoundly
shape both its culture and its planning challenges. Research universities face planning
challenges very different from those of community colleges.
Size. Institutional size (as determined by enrollments, budgets, or other measures) influences
the patterns and cadences of deliberation, decision making, and planning. Larger institutions
tend to be more fragmented, complicating alignment around a unitary vision.
Control. Public and private institutions display different degrees of autonomy and
approaches to decision making.
Collective bargaining environment. The presence of collective bargaining reduces the level of
collegiality and retards aggressive approaches to change.
Figure 1.4 illustrates the contextual factors that reflective planners and strategists must seek to
understand. Even within each of these context “cells,” the most successful planning style and
approach is variable. Nevertheless, planners and strategists must develop their capacity to shape
their approaches to their context, as further described in Chapters 3 and 4.
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22. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
A Guide to Planning for Change
This book draws on an extensive body of knowledge regarding planning in higher education.
These resources include the Society for College and University Planning’s (SCUP) A Guide for
New Planners (Norris and Poulton 1991), the body of knowledge of the SCUP Planning Institute,
articles from SCUP’s refereed journal Planning for Higher Education, and a long list of other SCUP
publications. We have also mined additional resources on planning in both higher education and
in other sectors and industries. References to these resources are provided both throughout the
book and in regularly updated online resource repositories. Many of the references are found in
figure 8.1, “A Critical List of Readings for Planning in Higher Education.” Other references are
found in Chapter 10. This book is divided into 10 chapters designed to meet the needs of planners
and strategists in today’s complex and ever-changing higher education environment.
Chapter 1: Introduction to A Guide to Planning for Change provides snapshots of the many
forms and faces of planning in higher education. It introduces basic planning concepts and sets
the stage for the remainder of the book.
Chapter 2: Integrated, Strategic, Aligned Planning describes why each of these three elements
is essential to the success of higher education planning. This chapter provides useful models and
techniques that can be applied to achieve alignment in strategy execution at the campus, college,
departmental, and program levels. It also describes how to align strategic planning, accreditation,
program review, continuous improvement, and performance measurement.
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23. ....................... A Guide to Planning for Change
Chapter 3: A Model for Strategic Planning and Executing Strategy outlines a comprehensive
model for strategic planning that includes navigating and leading change, executing and refining
strategy, building organizational capacity, and developing tactical/operational plans and
budgets, all of which are critical to creating strategic direction. This flexible model can be adapted
to the nuances of any environment or planning opportunity.
Chapter 4: Assessing Planning Opportunities provides resources for planners to assess their
environments and learn from the planning experiences of others. These resources include a guide
to the pitfalls and limitations of planning and a checklist for analyzing planning environments.
Chapter 5: The Politics of Planning for Change discusses the social side of planning: politics,
power, social networks, institutional culture, leading and navigating change, and providing
rewards and incentives for successful planning. This chapter deals with the politics of planning at
both the micro level (the politics of individual planning activities and their relationship to others)
and the macro level (the politics of planning in an overall enterprise model), weaving a profound
understanding of planning, leadership, and change.
Chapter 6: Changing Perspectives and Tools in Planning contains a brief summary of how
planning has evolved in higher education over the past 50 years. This chapter includes figures
that describe and compare planning in each of the past six decades, including the current one.
This chapter also sets the stage for an exploration of new planning directions in the future.
Chapter 7: New Directions in Planning Topics identifies a portfolio of 20 planning topics
important to understanding new directions in planning theory and practice. These new directions
suggest the nature of planning, strategy setting, and execution in the future. The printed
descriptions of these topics are linked to an online repository of resources prepared by expert
practitioners in these fields. These repositories are regularly updated and address the following
issues for each topic: (1) What forces are driving new directions? (2) What are the emerging new
directions? (3) How and when will these new directions affect integrated, strategic, aligned
planning? and (4) What are the key resources that capture these new directions?
Chapter 8: Core Readings and Resources provides a core reading list on planning as well as
links to online SCUP resources, including actual strategic plans, repositories of case studies, and
SCUP Planning Institute resources.
Chapter 9: Developing the Competencies of Planners and Strategists presents vignettes on
the many career paths followed by practicing planners in higher education today. It also
recommends resources and strategies for the professional development of individual planners.
Chapter 10: Summary of Resources for Planners and Strategists identifies the links to all the
online resources referenced in the text, references the critical reading annotations, and provides a
listing of textual references in addition to the annotated critical readings.
Figure 1.5 summarizes the contents of these chapters and their relationship to online resources.
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24. A Guide to Planning for Change .......................
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