Pilot Outputs - Consultation
The institutional experience - Beaumont College
"We believe that for the process of strategy development to be effective all the managers involved in its development must have an alignment with and understanding of the process. It was apparent in our work that there were varying levels of understanding and alignment within the leadership team. Following the InfoKit structure systematically revealed these variations in a way that otherwise would not have otherwise been apparent"
"Cascading the strategic conversation to middle managers was noted as being difficult by some LT members and the use of some of the techniques identified in this section was mentioned a number of times. Face to face team meetings were used by almost all the LT members to take the strategy sections and QuIP's to their teams for consultation, although there was some delegation to middle managers to achieve this. The choice of team meetings in order to carry out consultations fits the scale of the college. Not all LT members involved all members of their teams, in some cases only middle managers were consulted, in other cases managers (usually with smaller teams) met with all the staff in their line management structure"
The institutional experience (Sheffield)
Input from our own staff teams on the key future strategic themes was influenced by the guidance. However we made no use of the IT tools referred to, and relied instead on paper-based and face to face methods, backed up by update emails. The principal opportunity for staff input was a whole department meeting in April 2010 with an open invitation to all staff. Around 100 attended, and those present were asked to reflect, in small 'buzz' groups, on two questions:
- What are the key issues for the department in the next year?
- Where should we focus to improve our services?
Responses were collected immediately - based on attendees' thoughts written on to a single page proforma. These were subsequently collated and formed part of the background material used in the senior management consultation event described in below:
The milestone event used to consolidate the strategy was an away day for the departmental senior management team, held in May 2010. This was a structured event, drawing on a range of background material, including the output from the PESTLE analysis referred to above, which was refreshed on the day. Attendees were also asked to complete a SWOT analysis on the department in advance of the day. Other background papers were pre-circulated, including information on relevant recent national policy documents/statements, a summary of the outcomes of the work on mission and values, described, and the staff consultation exercise referred to above. During the course of the day, six areas for priority focus emerged from the synthesis of background preparation and participant input. These were subsequently distilled into six strategic themes. In determining the appropriate format and structure for the strategy, examples contained in the Pilot Outputs were considered. Ultimately we decided to continue to make use of the 'strategy map' format previously adopted.
A further round of consultation and testing followed, once again drawing on the guidance. Around 20 separate stakeholder 'engagements' were used to validate the emergent strategic themes, and to ensure that the likely outcome would be understood by staff, and thus enable more effective implementation. Consultation discussions took place with senior institutional managers, faculty representatives, students' union staff and officers, staff teams, and a number of individuals/groups from outside the university. During the consultation phase, coincidentally a very relevant report was issued by the key professional association for student services staff in the USA, on the future direction for student affairs, which was also used to validate the future direction of travel set out in the draft strategy map.
The final version of the strategy map was approved by the departmental senior management team in August 2010. A formal launch event with staff has just taken place at the time of writing in October 2010. Between these dates the strategy has been 'soft launched' in teams on an informal basis, principally by sharing the guiding strategic themes with teams, and encouraging colleagues to begin to use these as a reference point. Other communications, including a strategy website, were in place to support the launch event. Colourful desk coasters (setting out the departmental mission on one side and the six strategic themes on the other) have been distributed to every team. We have also set aside a small strategy 'seedcorn' budget which we will allocate across the department to fund start up activity associated with the strategy, such as team development events and specific items of expenditure.
