Hallmarks of Integrated Planning
The Critical Characteristics That Mark Effective Planning
What integrated planning looks like in practice will differ from unit to unit, institution to institution. As an approach or methodology, integrated planning is flexible. It can be applied to planning processes and change initiatives in various ways, adapting to support anticipated outcomes, institutional type, organizational culture, and other factors.
To make it easier to identify how you can apply integrated planning in your context, we’ve distilled the integrated planning approach into key hallmarks or characteristics that can be observed in any planning process, from institution-wide strategic planning to more focused unit planning carried out by departments, divisions, and offices, to change initiatives and other one-off processes.
Glossary
Approach: a particular manner of taking steps toward a particular purpose
Hallmark: a distinguishing characteristic, trait, or feature
Planning: a method that determines a preferred end state and identifies a set of intended actions, usually mutually related, through which one expects to achieve that end state
Principle: a fundamental assumption or guiding belief
Resources: funds, people, space/facilities, technology, and equipment
Unit: a specific group that is part of the larger institution
Integrated Planning Check: Are You Hitting the Mark?
Integrated planning generally has these hallmarks:
Future-Focused and Mission-Driven
Planning envisions a future aligned with an institution’s mission, makes decisions necessary to reach that vision, and commits to those decisions through actions.
Underlying Principle: Planning should help institutions fulfill their purpose, now and in the future.
Key Activities
- Futuring: Explore the potential future, scanning and analyzing trends and influences to identify what could happen (not just what will happen) in order to anticipate and prepare for emerging challenges and opportunities.
- Strategy: Envision a successful future state and use it to establish achievable long-term priorities.
- Mission, Vision, Values: Ground all planning decisions and actions in the institution’s mission, vision, and values.
- Commitment Through Actions: Make decisions, take actions, and allocate resources today with an eye toward achieving longer-term priorities.
Symptoms of Failure/Pain Points
When planning is not future-focused and mission-driven:
- New opportunities are acted on without considering whether they contribute to the institution’s mission or envisioned future.
- Decisions seem to be made without considering what the future might look like.
- The institution seems to be merely treading water or surviving.
- Decisions are made quickly based on whatever seems easiest in the moment.
- The institution never stops doing things. It keeps adding new programs, services, etc.
See It in Practice
- Use scenario planning to help your institution prepare for a volatile and uncertain future.
See related resource: An Integrated Approach to Scenario Planning: Recovery Planning in a Volatile Environment - Craft a mission statement that is both inspirational and useful.
See related resource: Reviewing and Updating Your Mission Statement
Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholders are strategically and intentionally engaged through planning and implementation in order to leverage their knowledge and insights, ultimately building buy-in and commitment.
Underlying Principle: Planning’s success depends on stakeholder contributions, buy-in, and commitment.
Key Activities
- Stakeholder Identification and Analysis: Encourage a holistic understanding of how stakeholders, roles, and efforts connect by identifying who can influence initiatives, who will be affected by them, and how to engage each group effectively.
- Intentional Engagement: Include a spectrum of engagement activities—communication and transparency, opportunities to provide input and feedback, invitations to participate in plan development, collaboration, and decision making—designed to leverage stakeholder insights and build buy-in and commitment.
- Planning Teams and Committees: Bring together people from varied backgrounds and roles to ensure planning teams reflect the diversity of perspectives needed for effective outcomes.
- Stakeholder Input: Create meaningful opportunities for input where participants’ voices matter and they actively contribute to decisions.
- Collaboration: Balance formal governance systems with informal collaboration, building on existing structures while encouraging open communication and information sharing between units.
- Communication: Use transparency and communication practices to ensure stakeholders understand how decisions are made, why they matter, and the progress and outcomes of planning initiatives.
Symptoms of Failure/Pain Points
Without stakeholder engagement:
- Plans encounter resistance to change because those who will implement the plan had no involvement in the decisions being implemented.
- The institution is regularly “blindsided” by consequences or outcomes that could have been foreseen if the right people were at the table to inform decisions and determine actions.
- The plan’s decisions and actions are either untenable, impractical, or won’t effectively move the institution forward because critical information and perspectives were missing or dismissed.
- People think planning is pointless because they’ve not been educated on its importance and role in the institution.
- Stakeholders complain that plan decisions—particularly the difficult ones—come out of nowhere.
See It in Practice
- Analyze your stakeholders and determine how to engage them meaningfully in your planning process.
See related resource: Stakeholder Analysis and Engagement Toolkit - Educate leadership about why a cross-functional team is needed, and how different representatives will be chosen.
See related resource: What Is Your Crisis ‘What If’? Create a Sustainable Approach to Emergency Response Planning
Alignment Up, Down, and Sideways
Decisions are guided by institutional priorities, informed by operational insights, and mindful of interdependencies.
Underlying Principle: Disconnected silos impede progress. Planning is most beneficial when decisions are made with a holistic, systems mindset of the plan’s role within the institution and its connections and interdependencies with other plans and initiatives.
Key Activities
- Guided by Priorities: Translate institutional priorities into actionable unit-level operations and decisions (down).
- Informed by Insights: Use insights, data, and feedback from operations and reporting units to inform planning and decision-making higher on the organizational chart (up).
- Mindful of Interdependencies: Coordinate resources, strategies, and processes between units (sideways).
Symptoms of Failure/Pain Points
Without alignment up, down, and sideways:
- Implementation falters because strategic plan goals are not translated into day-to-day operations.
- Resources are wasted because departments duplicate efforts without realizing that other departments are doing the same thing.
- Big changes and projects surprise those impacted because there was no coordination or communication between units.
- Decisions and goals seem disconnected from the realities experienced by those on the ground.
See It in Practice
- Use a cross-institutional effort to scale up successful student retention pilots, implementing a key theme in the strategic plan.
See related resource: Navigating Student Success: ‘Navigators’ Are Critical in Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Institution-Wide Initiative - Develop a campus master plan that creates a physical environment supportive of an institution’s strategic initiatives.
See related resource: The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Align Strategic, Physical, and Capital Planning for the Next Generation of Students
Informed by Internal and External Factors
Internal factors (institutional context, structure, performance, capacities) and external factors (environmental scan, peer benchmarking) are analyzed; these analyses inform the design of planning processes and decisions made during planning.
Underlying Principle: A wishlist is not a plan. Successful plans (and the processes that produce them) ground their ambitions in reality.
Key Activities
- Performance: Analyze institutional and other relevant performance data and use the insights to inform decisions.
- Capacities: Consider capacities and resources so plans balance optimism for what’s possible with pragmatism for what can be reasonably achieved in the plan’s timeframe.
- Environmental Scanning: Scan the external environment, both locally and globally, and anticipate potential impacts of trends and forces.
- Institutional Structure: Develop planning processes that align to and leverage established institutional processes and structures (budget, accreditation, governance bodies).
- Institutional Context and Culture: Design planning processes to work within an institution’s unique context (characteristics, conditions, and history) and organizational culture(s).
Symptoms of Failure/Pain Points
When planning is not informed by internal and external factors:
- Plans are wish lists with no connection to what can be realistically achieved.
- Institutions are caught off guard by larger social, demographic, and political trends. It frequently feels like they’re catching up or behind in their responses.
- Planning cannot be sustained because it’s positioned as an additional task everyone must do versus something that is merged into ongoing institutional processes and rhythms.
- Planning efforts fail because the process or the outcomes conflict with the beliefs and values underpinning the organization’s culture(s).
- Plan decisions are not resourced because the plan was not approved in time to inform resource allocation processes, like the budget.
- Stakeholder reticence is dismissed as “resistance to change” without considering how their reactions might be informed by their previous experiences with planning and change.
See It in Practice
- Synergize planning and accreditation practices to supercharge both.
See related resource: Weaving Planning and Accreditation Together for Action - Keep abreast of forces and trends in the environment.
See related resource: Trends for Higher Education report
Cyclical and Adaptive
Planning, resource allocation, implementation, and assessment are linked in an iterative cycle, ensuring plans inform actions and remain relevant and effective through regular evaluation and adjustment.
Underlying Principle: Planning is more important than the plan. The purpose of planning is not to produce a plan; it’s to help us make better decisions so the actions we take today propel us toward thriving tomorrow.
Key Activities
- Plan, Resource, Do, Assess, Adjust: Establish a dynamic cycle where plan priorities inform resource allocation and operations, while assessment data drives refinement of both plans and planning processes.
- Evaluate and Discuss Progress: Track and evaluate progress against measurable goals, regularly discussing outcomes in relation to resources required and institutional context.
- Continuous Improvement: Practice continuous improvement by adapting to internal performance indicators and external environmental changes, making data-informed decisions about what to start, improve, continue, or stop.
- Meaningful Measures: Ensure institutional effectiveness measures provide actionable intelligence that supports real-time adjustments while maintaining strategic direction.
Symptoms of Failure/Pain Points
When planning is not cyclical and adaptive:
- Plans “sit on the shelf” because there is no process to evaluate their progress and update them accordingly.
- Implementation fails because the plan has no impact on how resources are allocated. Plan priorities don’t have the resources necessary to be implemented, and activities not aligned with the plan continue to receive funding, staffing, space, etc.
- Data measurement is merely a compliance exercise and never used to improve programs, services, etc.
- The planning process is more committed to completing the plan on time than adjusting based on stakeholder feedback, resulting in a plan with little buy-in.
- When a plan’s strategies or initiatives aren’t progressing as expected, it’s difficult to determine why and identify what needs to be changed or adjusted.
See It in Practice
- Evaluate operational processes to identify opportunities for improvement.
See related resource: Institutional Process Mapping: A College Eliminates Service Gaps and Improves Efficiency and Collaboration - Adopt a framework that connects planning, budgeting, and assessment.
See related resource: A Guide for Optimizing Resource Allocation: Link Assessment, Strategic Planning, and Budgeting to Achieve Institutional Effectiveness
Integrated Planning Assessment Tool
Wonder how you’re doing? See if you’re hitting the mark with SCUP’s Integrated Planning Assessment Tool.
Continue learning about integrated planning by
exploring the players—who’s involved and affected.
Or go back to read What is Integrated Planning?
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