Situation:

The Faculty of Land and Food Systems was looking to operationalize their strategic plan while ensuring that the Faculty’s efforts were concentrated on the areas having the largest strategic impact.  Their current action plan needed to be more actionable and measurable, there were limited resources and there needed to be consensus around the Faculty’s key areas of focus.

Our Actions:

• Facilitated sessions to define the Faculty’s strategic pillars and their vision
• Facilitated sessions to define objectives supporting the strategic pillars
• Developed the infrastructure for the implementation of the strategic plan
• Developed KPI’s and a detailed measurement plan
• Prioritized objectives and activities for short and long-term achievement
• Validated the new strategic plan with faculty members and other key stakeholders and ensured alignment with the university’s priorities
• Recommended strategies for sustainability of their strategic plan

Results:

• Activities that were prioritized are now under way
• There is better alignment of the Faculty resources to areas of priority
• Greater transparency and an enhanced culture of routine sharing faculty-level performance metrics
• Enhanced awareness among faculty and staff of challenges, progress towards goals and outstanding achievements across strategic plan pillars and core areas of expertise
• More focused and better targeted recruitment, branding, marketing and fundraising activities

“The team in UBC Strategy Decision & Support (SDS) was immensely helpful during our Faculty’s strategic planning process. We are a smaller Faculty with limited resources, so partnering with SDS and receiving their counsel and guidance made the process much easier and ultimately resulted in a stronger strategic plan.”

-Rickey Yada, Dean, Faculty of Land and Food Systems