About Unit
Planning Goals:
Bear in mind the base structure and nomenclature of SSU’s Strategic Planner:
Immediate Planning Objectives
Action Steps
All units devise long range goals for improvement to support their missions and functions. Once the goals are approved by Unit Leader’s supervisor, units develop and adopt necessary immediate objectives to be completed either in sequence or simultaneously to achieve the planned goal. Eventually, in turn, a specific set of action steps are undertaken to fulfill each objective.
But, in a complex organization, as noted in the discussion of Affected Campus Units, activities and plans of one unit often impact or affect the behavior or work load of other units.
Example 1: Academic Department X plans to garner professional accreditation from its accrediting body. The year in which application is made impacts the work load in the Institutional Research Office, the unit supplying the barrage of data necessary to satisfy the accrediting body of the relevant academic program. Aware of the plan in advance, the Research office might have had professional data extractions prepared in advance and ready to meet the need in orderly fashion, rather than react in emergency mode after the fact—a procedure prone to error.
Example 2: Student Service Unit Z plans to truck students in large numbers off to regional meetings for leadership training experiences. Timing of the event impact the transportation unit where the objective of transporting students must be met. Without plans in advance, it could negatively impact the athletic department planning to use transportation services to haul students to a tournament whose timing is in conflict with the workshops. Aware of the plan in advance, the transportation department could have made long-term arrangements for modest supplemental transportation rather than be forced into expensive emergency arrangements after the fact.
Realistically, it often happens that planning goals of a particular unit must be undertaken with the support of immediate planning objectives in another unit. In order to identify and track those planning objectives undertaken in of support another units’ planning goals, the Strategic Planner incorporates a window where objectives of a unit may be linked both to goals of its own and also to goals of other units. Recording these cross-unit linkages, it is possible to have a comprehensive list, at any time, of all the support work flowing out of one unit, across organizational boundaries, in support of plans in other units. This is an aspect of strategic planning often overlooked in more conventional “flat file” planning systems.
Naturally, no immediate objective should be undertaken if it is not in support of some long range goal somewhere within the organization. Certainly the Budget Authority would never allocate scarce resources to support envisioned objectives that do not support some valid (authorized) university goal. Accordingly, the linkage between objectives and the goals they support should be established and indicated concretely in the Strategic Planner by making the associations explicit. Once the linkages are established, it is a simple matter to print a report in real time that shows all the objectives, university wide, that are being undertaken in support of each authorized planning goal within the system.