A Case Study from Temple University
Summary: Does your office need a strategic plan to guide your daily work and priorities? Read how one disability resource director used strategic planning to realign office activities and focus after an extended period of staff turnover.
Getting Started
Although there are many good reasons to write a strategic plan, there is never a perfect time to start. A host of competing demands constantly stands in the way of planning. In 2015, after the Disability Resources and Services department at Temple University had experienced significant staff turnover and restructuring, I took charge as a new director facing new challenges, and I could not ignore the need for planning any longer. I made it a priority out of necessity and set aside three days between fall and spring semesters to hold a leadership retreat so the associate director and I could build on our experiences and align our priorities. As a larger department (9 full-time staff members), we felt it was important for leadership to meet and build consensus about important initiatives before soliciting whole staff input.
The first step was to press pause on all other major projects prior to beginning the planning process. Obviously our student services could not be put on hold, but all other projects had to wait. Two important goals of our planning process were to establish a vision for our department that would guide what and how we would work and to designate clear priorities that would guide when different actions would occur. We had to reign in a lot of the work we were already busy doing in order to lay a new foundation based on a unified set of goals, values, and priorities.
Finding Direction
Using a planning template developed by Tom Thompson, Emily Singer Lucio, and Karen Pettus, and presented at the 2014 AHEAD conference, we adapted a strategic planning process that drew upon two main sources of information: an AHEAD external program review of Temple’s disability services that had been completed in 2007, and the AHEAD Program Standards. The planning template led us through a series of exercises to help articulate the mission, vision, and values of the department, identify existing strengths and weakness, and narrow the scope of our strategic plan.
As a departmental exercise, we had rewritten our mission statement in 2013, a couple years earlier, to highlight both the student services side and the consultation services side of our operations. We agreed to remove the word “support” from our mission and replace it with “lead.” These subtle changes helped express how we wanted to be seen: as leaders who work with individual students on a case-by-case basis and who consult with the entire university community on access and inclusion. The vision statement and departmental values we developed in the 2015 leadership retreat were brand new, and served as a compass for strategic planning. They have become a way to guide subsequent formal presentations and informal conversations about the direction of the department.
Useful Resources
The report from the 2007 program review and the AHEAD Program Standards worked hand in hand to guide our planning. The program review identified areas of strength and weakness. This allowed us to select only certain priorities, the areas of greatest need, to concentrate on for purposes of a three-year plan. For example, the associate director and I agreed that our student services had evolved since the 2007 external program review. Our department had made gains in recent years by acquiring a database system, participating in an institution-wide accessible technology initiative, and updating our job descriptions. Those areas, which were identified as urgent priorities in the 2007 program review, were no longer screaming for attention. However, other areas identified in the report, including consultation, information dissemination, awareness/training, and assessment were now the areas of critical importance for our department and our institution.
The AHEAD Program Standards gave us an itemized list of objectives in each area of focus. This helped us create detailed action steps to add to our plan. I created a spreadsheet with each of the program standards and sub standards we agreed to focus on in our three-year plan and matched those with the related 2007 program review recommendations and newly designated action steps. The action steps identified the responsible parties and a deadline for completion.
Gathering Additional Information
As we took our strategic plan through several revisions, we continued to gather more information and input from key partners. These important assessment steps made our efforts more rich in detail and relevant to students, staff, and administration. For example, we conducted student focus groups around campus inclusion and accessibility, which confirmed some of our beliefs about priorities and challenged other assumptions. We circulated a DRS staff questionnaire and gave a DRS staff presentation of the strategic plan in order to solicit input from the whole staff. I discussed the strategic plan many times with my supervisor, the Senior Associate Dean of Students, who gave important feedback from a position outside disability services. Finally, I scheduled time to meet with the two authors of the 2007 program review at an AHEAD conference to update them on how we had grown and where we were headed as a department.
Recommendations
My recommendations for anyone seeking to use the AHEAD Program Standards for a strategic planning process are:
- Get an AHEAD external program review first. If you don’t, you’ll have to do an in-depth self-assessment of your own.
- Don’t try to do everything at once. The AHEAD Program Standards are too broad to be tackled all in one strategic plan. Concentrate on the areas of most critical importance to your department and your institution and create timelines over 3-5 years to reach your goals.
- Involve key stakeholders in different ways. I found it effective to have two administrators in disability services create the plan, to involve DRS staff members in a limited way and keep them informed throughout the process, to obtain student input through focus groups and surveys, and to bounce ideas off Student Affairs and AHEAD leadership.
- Present your plan often to sharpen your ability to speak it. Every presentation I give is another opportunity to reflect on our visions statement and core values, and to deepen my understanding of them.
- Re-assess throughout the process. One year into our strategic plan we held a leadership retreat to determine the status of our plan and make adjustments as needed.
Resources You Can Use
Thanks to Aaron Spector for contributing this case study
Contact information:
Aaron Spector
Director Disability Resources and Services Temple University
aaron.spector@temple.edu