Responding to a changing world often requires institutions to develop new programs, reinvent existing ones, or make other fundamental changes to structures and services. Making effective decisions about program direction requires careful strategic planning. This task typically falls to the program administrator, who most likely has risen through the ranks of teachers and may lack the experience or skills needed to manage the strategic planning process. Furthermore, administrators are often overwhelmed by day-to-day responsibilities and have difficulty setting aside the time and resources for successful strategic planning. After all, who has time for planning while trying to run a busy program? In this article we explain the benefits and challenges of strategic planning and describe a framework for implementing a strategic planning process that can be used in any educational environment.

Benefits of Strategic Planning

Most administrators can readily see the benefits of strategic planning. Planning creates a path to achieving long-term goals that may be necessary for the success or even survival of a program. Once a plan is in place, the program can more efficiently allocate resources as administrators fund those initiatives that help achieve that plan. Ultimately, the plan should save time and resources. The process of developing the plan itself also has the benefit of team building as, ideally, faculty and staff work together to determine goals and objectives. In addition, people working in the organization feel empowered as they are freed up to be creative in accomplishing the goals in their area that contribute to the plan.

Another benefit comes from the evaluation process that a plan requires. It is necessary to develop a mechanism for ongoing review of the plan’s components; the procedures that are developed to accomplish that review in the context of strategic planning spill over to other domains of managing the program.

Challenges to Strategic Planning

Strategic planning does present some challenges. Perhaps the first obstacle faced by an administrator is convincing the members of his or her program that it is worth doing. Often, institutions have a culture of just-in-time management that runs counter to a comprehensive planning process. Furthermore, faculty and staff are often too busy just trying to do their work to engage in the process. Institutions also may have a history of aborted planning initiatives that have left people skeptical of trying again. A major challenge is to overcome a culture of naysayers and marshal the time and resources required to successfully implement a strategic planning process. To overcome these potential obstacles, the strategic planning process needs to be transparent and inclusive. When it is completed, it should reflect the will and the ideas of the entire organization.

A Six-Step Process for Strategic Planning

The six-step process described here has been shown to work well in language teaching organizations. The ideas are adapted from the model presented in the overview of strategic planning by Klinghammer (2012).

Step 1: Form a Team

Forming the team that will conduct the process requires careful thought. The administrator who is launching the strategic planning process cannot undertake the process alone. The best planning groups are a representative body of people from the faculty and staff who have the potential for working well together and who can look beyond their narrow self-interests. This group not only develops the plan but communicates with the greater organization throughout the process to build support, or buy-in, for the plan. Adding an outside facilitator, if resources permit, can also be useful in getting the planning process off the ground and keeping it moving ahead.

Step 2: Establish a Common Vision

The initial task of the planning group is to develop a common vision. The group needs to develop a consensus on the direction of the program or institution. Developing a vision often requires revisiting the mission statement or creating one if there is none in place; the mission statement should include the purpose of the organization. The final piece of the visioning exercise is to build on that mission statement and begin imagining, in general terms, where the institution should be in 3 to 5 years. This can be accomplished by having each of the planning group members write a statement that captures their projected image of the future of the organization, share and meld those ideas, and then come together around a single statement. That vision becomes the foundation for the more concrete tasks that lie ahead.

Step 3: Consider Your Context

The next task is to engage in an analysis of the program’s environment. There are three elements to this phase. The first is stakeholder analysis. The group needs to identify all the people that care about the direction of the program. These stakeholders may include faculty, students, administrators inside and outside the program, sponsors, companies, and academic departments. In addition to naming them, it is important to understand what elements of the program the stakeholders care about so the team can be mindful of these constituencies as the planning process unfolds.

The second element of the analysis is to look internally to examine the organization itself, and externally to study trends and other environmental factors that may have an impact on the organization. A common device for conducting this examination is called a SWOT analysis, in which teams identify internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. Another tool to examine trends is the PEST analysis, which looks at the political, economic, social, and technological realms to determine how these factors may affect the organization.

A third element is a competitor analysis, which looks at what comparable institutions are doing. These are organizations that might be trying to attract the same students, the same partners, or the same funding opportunities as your program. Additionally, an analysis of competitors may reveal useful models for how to respond to environmental factors. Also, some organizations viewed as competitors may be identified as potential collaborators for future projects.

Step 4: Draft a Written Plan

Now that the vision is in place and the environmental scan has been completed and analyzed, it is time to identify and then prioritize strategic areas. What key areas of the organization need attention? At this point, the planning team should make a large list of what they determine to be those areas. Examples might include student services, enrollment management, curriculum overhaul, faculty development, new facilities, and governance structure. The team can either think of large categories and brainstorm within them, or brainstorm freely and then group similar ideas together so that the three to five most important areas emerge. These strategic areas become the starting point for the written strategic plan.

The plan is created following a backward design model where each step of the plan is necessary for achieving what follows it. For each strategic area, the planning team writes long-term outcomes (LTOs), which are a few statements that specify what will be achieved by the end of the planning period for each strategic area. Successful LTOs are those that are concrete, ambitious, written in the present tense in one sentence, and make clear exactly what is to happen.

At this point, it is wise for the team to step back and prioritize the outcomes. It is a mistake if the initial brainstormed list of ideas becomes the plan. Most organizations don’t have the resources to do everything they would like to do. The team needs to pare down the list of possible outcomes to a workable list and prioritize them. This will mean that some items won’t be accomplished—but it is just as important to make clear decisions about what not to do so that there is agreement in the organization about where time, effort, and money should be committed.

For each LTO, the planning team then writes a series of SMART goals. These are measurable milestones to be accomplished within one year. The SMART acronym has various interpretations, but we take it to mean means goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-framed. Finally, the planning team facilitates the writing of action steps. These are the concrete steps that identify who will do what and when in order to accomplish the goals. Often, at this point, the planning group more formally invites others within the organization to participate in the writing of these steps.

Step 5: Implement the Plan

Hopefully, the existence of the strategic plan will not come as a surprise to anyone in the organization. The planning team, however, needs to reconfirm the buy-in of everyone in the institution for the implementation to be successful. There should be clear performance markers that can be achieved in the early stages of implementation. The community needs to see that the plan will work for it to gain momentum. It is important for the leadership to celebrate accomplishments and recognize the achievements of the program as a whole and of individual milestones as they are reached.

Step 6: Reviewing and Revising the Plan

The final step is evaluation and revision. The strategic plan is not intended to be stiff and inflexible but rather to be malleable and to change over time. The planning group that put the plan together initially needs to conduct regular, formal check-ins to make sure that the plan is on track, and to make modifications as needed. Strategic planning is a never-ending process. The initial plan is the toughest to put together. However, once the institution has success with this kind of forward thinking decision making, the subsequent plans become much easier to develop and implement.

Reference

Klinghammer, S. J. (2012). Strategic planner. In M. A. Christison & F. L. Stoller (Eds.), A handbook for language program administrators (2nd ed., pp. 79–98). Miami Beach, FL: Alta Books.

Bruce Rindler served as the associate director at the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs at Boston University for more than 20 years. He remains on the faculty at Boston University, teaching ESL and training teachers in the MA-TESOL Program. He also works as an ESL program consultant.

Joe McVeigh has worked in intensive English programs at the California State University, Los Angeles; the California Institute of Technology; the University of Southern California; and Middlebury College. He works independently as a textbook author, teacher-trainer, and consultant.