Strategic planning is how colleges and schools set a clear direction, focus limited resources and build a shared sense of purpose across faculty, staff, students, alumni and partners. An effective strategic plan lays the groundwork for meaningful, sustained progress over the next three to five years. At the University of Utah, strategic planning also serves as the bridge between college-level priorities and Impact 2030 goals: expanding access, strengthening student outcomes, growing research and increasing societal impact.

This year, the Office of the EVPAA is providing a toolkit to support deans and their teams in developing or refreshing unit-level strategic plans. It includes tools, templates and brief fictitious examples that show how the pieces come together in practice.

How strategic and operational planning connect

A strategic plan defines where a college is headed. The Academic Enterprise Plan (AEP) is the annual, operational counterpart that translates that direction into coordinated, data-informed decisions, covering enrollment goals, faculty and staff hiring, student success initiatives and budget requests, among other things. Ideally, the AEP draws directly from the unit’s strategic plan (its mission, vision, priorities, goals, strategies and metrics), showing how the next year’s work advances college priorities and institutional goals.

Strategic planning process at a glance

Strategic planning works best when a clearly defined team leads the work. Often, strategic planning efforts are committee-led with broad representation, while others are coordinated through department chairs or driven by the dean’s leadership group. Regardless of the model, the team’s job is typically to gather input, synthesize institutional and external data and draft priorities, goals, strategies and metrics for review. Efforts also benefit from defined supporting roles such as project management or communications, for example.

Strong plans use a process designed to anchor decisions in data, including:

• Secondary data (peer benchmarking, environmental scans, etc.) to understand external trends and set realistic, ambitious targets.
• Institutional data (enrollment patterns, course access and outcomes, faculty composition/workload, research/creative activity, student support, etc.) to clarify current performance and capacity.
• Stakeholder input gathered through targeted engagement with the people who will carry out the plan (faculty, staff, students, alumni, community partners, etc.) to surface opportunities, risks and resource implications.

What the toolkit includes

To make strategic planning practical and doable, the toolkit provides:

• Clear definitions and examples of mission, vision, values, priorities, goals, strategies and metrics, including a complete sample plan for a fictitious college.
• Three sample leadership models (committee-led, department-led, leadership-team-led), example week-by-week timelines and suggested supporting roles (project management, qualitative/quantitative leads, communications, facilitation, documentation, etc.).
• Guidance on how to use methods like peer comparisons and environmental scans alongside leveraging institutional data.
• Templates and guidance for engaging faculty, staff, students, alumni and community partners in the process, including listening sessions, short surveys, open feedback forms and town halls (with sample questions and agendas).
• Tips for putting the plan into action, including communicating the plan and setting up simple accountability rhythms so the plan becomes a living document.

Strategic planning is ultimately about alignment, connecting each unit’s distinctive strengths and ambitions to Impact 2030 and positioning units to link long-term strategic direction to near-term action through the AEP. This toolkit is part of Mission-Aligned Planning (MAP), the Academic Affairs framework that provides shared tools, data and support so units can align academic planning and resource decisions with Impact 2030. The aim is to make that alignment more easily achievable.