Wednesday, November 01, 2023

Strategic planning + departmental reviews

It's been a while since I've written a post about the ways of academia, so I thought it might be time, though it's not exactly glamorous or exciting.  There are certain cycles in research universities, and two interrelated ones are the cycle of departmental strategic planning and the cycle of external departmental reviews.

Strategic planning can be extremely important, as it allows departments to take stock of where things are, what opportunities exist for improvement (in terms of research, teaching, departmental operations), and how the department aspires to move forward.  Often this can involve a hiring plan, based on demographic trends in the department (e.g., how many faculty lines are expected to be available in the next, say, five to seven years?), rising field/school/university research priorities (e.g., there is likely to be enormous investment in AI/ML in the coming years).  Discussions for strategic planning can be frought, since even maintaining departmental faculty size means alloting new hires between different possible research areas in a zero sum.  Still, arriving at a departmental plan is often expected at one level up (that of a School or College, depending on the university's org chart labeling scheme), and having a plan that department members know and understand is helpful in transparency of how decisions get made that shape the future of the department.  It doesn't make sense to do reformulate these plans at too rapid a frequency, since the ability to implement the plan can be strongly perturbed by, e.g., economic events, global pandemics, or big changes in university leadership.

Very often, deans (or provosts) also value periodic reviews of departments by an external visiting committee.  The visiting committee is typically put together with input from the department (research areas that should be represented, suggestions of possible reviewers) and invited to come for a couple of days of interviews and departmental presentations.  These reviews are typically very broad, looking at research, teaching, departmental climate, staffing levels and organization, infrastructure and space needs, etc.  It's important to talk to all stakeholders (departmental leadership, TT and NTT faculty, staff, undergrad and grad students, postdocs, and of course the dean or equivalent who is the intended recipient of the report). The expected output of these visits is a report to the dean (or provost).  Such a report can be very helpful for the department to get feedback on their plans and operations, and to serve as a way of putting priorities forward to the dean/provost level.  Similarly, often deans find these things valuable as a way to make certain arguments up to higher levels.  It seems to be human nature that a statement made by a nominally objective external committee can get more traction than the same statement made by locals.  Like strategic plans, it only makes sense to do external reviews on a timescale sufficiently long that the department would have a chance to address issues raised from the previous visit before the next one.  For both of these things, every five years is on the edge of being too frequent, and every ten years would definitely be too long an interval.

Participating in external visits takes time, but I've found it to be a very valuable experience.  It's allowed me to meet and work with faculty from a variety of places, and it can be very helpful to see how other institutions do things (even at a level of learning about tools like software that can be useful for tracking degree progress, or organizations that work to facilitate career placement at the graduate level).  

3 comments:

  1. A very basic first set of questions: how exactly do you define ‘strategic’ planning and differentiate it from other types of planning? I mean, in some sense, isn’t formulating a plan almost by definition the same thing as forming a strategy?

    I’ve read others’ thoughts on this, and I get the sense that, intuitively, strategy is more abstract and associated with the big-picture long-term - the ‘forest’ if you will. I often hear it contrasted with tactics, which is more concrete and related to short-term steps you take towards the end goal - the ‘trees’ if you want.

    But this seems very fuzzy to me. I guess that’s fine, but I was just curious if you, personally, associate ‘strategic’ planning with something more well-defined.

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  2. Anonymous11:43 AM

    https://phys.org/news/2023-11-avalanche-published-academic-articles-erode.html

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  3. @anon, I'm going to write a post about that over the weekend. (It's been a busy week.)

    @PPP, you've got it. "Strategic" means long-term planning with an eye toward external trends (what is actually scientifically exciting and coming down the pipe? What are the university's larger-scale plans?). There's a blurry line here btw strategy and tactics, but tactics tends to be short-term and rather reactive.

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