
Program Overview
The higher education landscape is changing dramatically in the face of increasingly complex, challenging and uncertain operating environment. Many of these challenges are not new, but have in the last ten years pervaded every aspects of the higher education system at a global scale. Examples of these challenges include: increasing demand for high quality education with a promise of higher graduate employability, budgetary constraints, dwindling resources, changing student demographics and learning preferences, changing employers’ and job market requirements, the emergence of new and cost effective delivery models and the proliferation of technology and eLearning, and more recently the negative effect of the global political landscape on internationalization and student mobility.
In view of these challenges and the emerging paradigm affecting higher education landscape, university leaders are indeed compelled to re-evaluate their priorities and appropriately formulate strategies for sustainable performance. In view of the need to address these challenges, strategic planning has emerged as one of the most widely used and valuable management tools for assessing an institution’s internal strength and weakness and external opportunities and threats, articulating its vision and mission, facilitating the formulation of new strategies, identifying risks and priorities, allocating resources and setting critical measures for success.
This three-day workshop will provide an engaging and interactive environment for executives to learn, apply and collectively share their experience while applying the tools and techniques of strategic planning through case studies and hands-on examples from similar institutions internationally. In addition to providing tools and techniques, the workshop will also engage the participants to think strategically taking into account the challenges affecting their institutions and work in teams to chart strategic scenarios for the future.
Target Audience
Effectiveness planning directors and managers in higher education including universities and colleges as well as other postsecondary institutions in the UAE and elsewhere in the MENA region.
Program Structure
Session (1): Building your capacity for strategic thinking and planning
- What is strategic planning?
- Linking planning with quality and accreditation
- Why planning fails
- Strategic Planning ten (10) critical questions
- Barriers to strategy implementation
Session (2): Charting your strategic journey
- Understanding the higher education landscape and its challenges
- Visioning excellence
- Articulating your core values
Session (3): Environmental scanning
- Stakeholder Analysis
- Defining core competences and identifying risks and constraints
- SWOT Analysis
Session (4): Formulating institutional strategies for the future
- Making strategic choices using the three value disciplines
- Defining your stakeholders’ value proposition
Session (5): Translating your strategy into measurable objectives and measures
- Crafting institutional strategic focus areas and goals / objectives
- Developing meaningful measures of success
Session (6): Creating institutional synergy through strategy alignment
- Cascading your institutional plan
- Determining potential vertical and horizontal synergies
- Communicating your strategy
Session (7): Closing the loop – Keeping the planning process alive through effective governance and accountability
- Strategy review and reporting process
- Risk management
- Leadership
Session (8): Putting together your strategic plan
- Critical elements of a strategic plan document
- Examples of strategic plans from leading international universities