Strategic planning
Sustainability Office
Growth often drives — and requires — change. One way for organizations to address change is to modify or update their strategic plans. The UIT Strategic Planning and Process Team can help your team identify goals and ways to implement or reach them.
The challenge
The university’s sustainability efforts are vast and far reaching. Focus areas include academics, emissions, energy, funding, transportation, waste and recycling, and water, with the goal of building a sustainable future at the university. These efforts have the ability to affect students, faculty, staff, and the public, a constituency that regularly increases and constantly evolves. The Sustainability Office needed to update its strategy to better serve this growing, more diverse U community.
Our approach
Under new leadership, the office hired the UIT Strategic Planning and Process Team as independent facilitators to lead an objective, two-day strategic planning retreat.
The Strategic Planning and Process Team began by capturing the Sustainability leadership team’s goals and objectives. We worked with them to understand how they wanted the team to operate to best serve its constituents. We documented their scope, stakeholders (including faculty volunteers), and risks of the work, including their constraints. We then designed a facilitation plan to maximize each teammate’s contributions to resetting the strategic plan.
Day 1
The Sustainability Office’s leadership team opened the retreat by explaining the goal and desired outcomes of the retreat and reviewing the existing vision and mission of the office.
After opening with an icebreaker to build trust, we asked Sustainability staff to identify and define their many constituents. We centered all discussions around their constituents. The conversation was robust because of the passion they have for helping the U think sustainably. For example, they listed efforts in student and faculty support. They quickly noticed that their existing strategy and services did not align with the demand from the university community.
We then broke them into groups to ask about the Sustainability Office’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and aspirations. This fostered awareness of their environment and situation about where the team has been and where it might go. We closed day one with a team brainstorm session on how the office could operate to meet its vision.
Day 2
We helped the team visualize its goals and prioritize them. Leadership examined gaps with the staff, whose contributions helped determine how they would serve their constituents in the future. The team then conducted interviews with each other to understand their perspectives. Finally, we helped the team create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound) goals around the office’s operations to achieve its strategic goals.
Impact
- Sustainability staff felt included in raising issues and suggesting ideas
- The discussions highlighted mismatches between new strategic goals and existing operations
- Sustainability leadership used the information to align office operations with the new demands of the university
- Changes included reimagining how the office could better support students and faculty, program management in food equity, and strategic sustainability efforts for university leadership
Need help with your strategic plan? Contact us!
You can also email us at strategyconsult@utah.edu.