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Integrated Planning Players

Who participates in integrated planning in higher education?

Integrated planning recognizes that planning alone will not lead to institutional thriving. That requires actions across the campus, like connecting resources to intent, using data to inform decisions, aligning actions across silos, and enacting true shared governance. 

Integrated planning channels the unique strengths and expertise of different functions across the institution toward success. There are many different roles to play in an integrated planning approach.

Planners and More: Roles That Contribute to Integrated Planning

These roles play a part in integrated planning:

Planning Coordinators or Institutional Planners

A planning coordinator or institutional planner is the person tasked with leading planning in the institution, or the person responsible for coordinating and supporting planning activities institution-wide–in other words, it’s the institution’s resident planning expert.

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The institution’s resident planning expert often kicks off and sustains the adoption of integrated planning.


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Establish integrated planning as the way to plan and move change forward in the institution
  • Influence institution-wide policies and practices to support integrated planning
  • Support, coach, and provide resources to help others on campus use an integrated planning approach

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Using an integrated planning approach increases the likelihood a plan will be implemented.
  • Integrated planning emphasizes flexibility and the importance of adapting planning to each institution’s unique context.
  • An overarching framework or philosophy can be applied to planning across the institution. 
  • The emphasis on engagement, collaboration, and working within the realities of the institution reduces resistance to change.

Resources

Institutional Effectiveness

Institutional Effectiveness Office staff are those who organize and implement evaluation, assessment, and improvement initiatives so the institution can determine how well it is fulfilling its mission and achieving its goals.

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Data, information, and intelligence are necessary for making smart decisions.


Note: While planning as a function has increasingly been placed under the Institutional Effectiveness Office’s areas of responsibility, the institutional effectiveness function itself is critical to integrated planning.

Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Establish and maintain the infrastructure to collect, analyze, and communicate data
  • As data experts, help others in the institution identify, collect, and analyze the data necessary to make an informed decision
  • Ensures plan goals and efforts can be measured in a way that allows course correction, adaptability, and continuous improvement during plan implementation
  • Schedules assessment efforts and ensures they align with planning processes/decisions

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Integrated planning elevates the institutional effectiveness role from simple compliance reporting to its full potential—experts in all aspects of meaningful measurement that can move the institution forward.
  • Integrated planning’s hallmarks align with the standards of many regional accrediting bodies. Adopting an integrated planning approach can streamline accreditation-related activities.
  • The alignment of goals and priorities across the institution helps bust siloed data collection and provides a foundation for aligning data practices and structures.

Resources

Budget Office

The Budget Office—those responsible for the financial health of an institution—have a critical role to play in integrated planning.

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Plans cannot be implemented without the resources necessary to do so. 


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Adapt budget processes and templates so that plan decisions inform resource decisions
  • Help planning coordinators determine how planning processes can link to budget processes
  • Provide information about resource realities during planning, ensuring the plan is ambitious but achievable
  • Provide skills and expertise to the planning process, particularly when estimating resources necessary to implement the plan; forecast resource implications of plan decisions

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Integrated planning provides transparency to the campus community so they understand how and why resource decisions are made.
  • A highly engaging planning process can broadly educate stakeholders about resource realities and solicit their ideas and insights for addressing those.
  • The emphasis on cross-functional collaboration and horizontal alignment makes it easier to find and act on efficiencies between departments while avoiding duplicative efforts.
  • The use of data to make decisions ensures resources are invested in priorities and efforts that are making progress.

Resources

Unit Leadership/Middle Managers

The unit leader/middle manager is the person responsible for a unit in the institution. Depending on the institution, a unit can be a college, academic department, or non-academic department. 

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The unit leader is critical to the alignment and implementation of institution-wide plans and for planning within their unit.


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Adopt an integrated planning approach for their unit’s plans, initiatives, projects, and change activities
  • Translate institutional priorities into the unit’s longer-term priorities and day-to-day activities, facilitating vertical alignment
  • As resource managers, allocate resources like funds, space, technology, personnel, and equipment based on plan priorities
  • Collaborate and build relationships with other units, facilitating horizontal alignment
  • Provide on-the-ground intelligence to inform institutional planning efforts and decisions

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Removes bottlenecks to progress by helping unit managers determine how they can work within their institution’s internal realities, including politics, structure, and culture
  • Helps them increase support for their unit’s initiatives by aligning with broader institutional priorities
  • Provide meaningful, actionable data they can use to improve operations
  • Less likely to be surprised by what’s occurring in other units thanks to horizontal alignment and cross-functional collaboration

Resources

Senior Leaders (or Executive Leadership)

Senior leaders or executive leadership are those who lead the institution and are responsible for its ongoing fiscal health. That may include the board, system leadership, president, provost, and cabinet.

More about this role

Integrated planning requires vision and discipline across the institution.


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Integrated planning asks the institution to change how it operates. Senior leadership spurs these changes. Consistently conveying their commitment to integrated planning in words and actions gives legitimacy to the approach and clout to those making the change. ​
  • Senior leaders serve as important champions for integrated planning. When stakeholders understand why planning is important and see senior leadership respecting the process and its decisions, they are likely to do the same.​
  • Planning always requires resources—time, information, and sometimes even outside expertise. An integrated planning approach requires real, ongoing investment in skills, capacities, structures, and tools. Senior leaders can ensure the investment in and capacity for integrated planning.

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Integrated planning aligns operations and day-to-day tasks to the institution’s overall strategic aims, helping senior leadership actualize their institution’s vision for the future.
  • In VUCA times, institutions must respond to more rapid change. Investing in integrated planning as an institutional capacity ensures institutions are ready for change.
  • Grounded in external realities, integrated planning prevents surprise disruptions, helping senior leaders act (instead of react).
  • Its emphasis on stakeholder engagement, cross-functional collaboration, and the importance of institutional context and organizational culture prevents the resistance that plagues many planning efforts.

Resources

Change Leaders

Change leaders are those in the institution who might not have formal responsibilities related to planning but still use integrated planning as a tool to move change forward.

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Using integrated planning to lead change and innovation outside formal planning processes helps ingrain the approach as an institutional norm.


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Change initiatives can provide positive test cases for using an integrated planning approach.
  • Using integrated planning outside formal planning processes provides momentum toward integrated planning maturity. Integrated planning becomes the way work gets done in an institution.

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Integrated planning provides a way to tackle sticky, complex problems.
  • The approach builds a broad commitment for change.
  • The emphasis on institutional context can help navigate change through complex operational environments.

Resources

Faculty

Faculty are those who engage in teaching, research, and service in the institution.

More about this role

Faculty can supercharge the adoption of integrated planning or stop it in its tracks.


Why Are They Important to Integrated Planning?

  • Their power and influence can motivate others to either support an integrated planning approach or ignore it entirely.
  • They are critical participants in the “plan, resource, do, assess” cycle.

How Does Integrated Planning Help Them?

  • Integrated planning values true shared governance, giving faculty a real voice in decisions about the institution’s future.
  • With integrated planning, resources are distributed more transparently and toward agreed-on priorities, rather than going to pet projects or the faculty member with the most influence.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and insights from data can help faculty learn more about their students and how they might be served even better.

Resources

Continue learning about integrated planning by
identifying its applications—where it provides value.

Or, go back to
read about the hallmarks of integrated planning.

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