 Welcome everyone. This is Una Dele from the Community College Consortium for OER at Open Education Global. And welcome to our session on strategic planning, a guide to avoiding pitfalls and achieving your vision. And we're really thrilled to join you here at OpenEd Global in November of 2020. First up, I want to introduce my co-presenters here. And Lisa and Sue are also the co-presidents of the CCCER, CCCER Executive Council. And so, have been working with me and the rest of our stakeholders on a strategic planning process. So first up, I'd like to introduce Lisa Young. She's the faculty director for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona. And next, I'd like to introduce Sue Tasjian. She is the instructional design coordinator at Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts. And both Lisa and Sue have a lot of experience with strategic planning at their institutions, which has been very helpful as we've gone through this process with CCCER. So these are the guiding questions for our agenda. Talking about when is the right time or maybe the wrong time to start strategic planning. And we have a little bit of fun to share with you around that. And what information do you need to collect to get going on this process? How can you engage and get by in from key stakeholders who are probably very busy and have a lot of competing priorities as well? And then what must be in place at the end of the process so that this resulting plan can be used and who's going to execute it? And finally, how are you going to measure impact and update it over time? Because this will be a living document. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with CCCER, we have been working with community colleges for well over a decade now, primarily across the United States to expand OER awareness and access to those materials to support faculty choice and development of OER materials to foster regional leadership around OER. And this is at the state level and to share a lot of solutions that have been found to work well. And at the heart of all, this is improving success for our students, particularly looking at equity for students who would otherwise find it challenging to get their education. So why strategic planning? Well, CCCER was a few years ago decided that we really wanted to be putting together plans that we could execute to for several years at a time. And the importance of that is being able to, number one, be very intentional about the work that you're doing and then also be able to measure that impact. And so that's what motivated this process and for us to get started. So we always start with definitions. And here is a very standard definition of what strategic planning is. So it's a systematic process that an organization agrees on and builds commitment among the key stakeholders to priorities that are essential to its mission. And that will help them with guiding the allocation of resources to achieve the priorities around their mission. So we're going to dive right into that. And the question comes up about when to commit to a strategic plan or to start one. And we have kind of an interesting story at CCCER. We started this last year and we're moving along quite well up until about February or March when the pandemic hit. And things kind of came to a standstill. So we can't always predict that in advance, but our advice would be don't start in the middle of a pandemic. Another time to consider that might not be the best time is if you have an executive director who is exiting out of the organization and you're waiting to hire someone new, that might be a time to wait till the new executive director comes on board. Because this is a plan for several years out and you want to make sure that the new executive director and new staff potentially that would come in are really bought in to the plan. And I think some of the things that you really want to look for is you want to make sure that your organization is ready to also look at external circumstances that might be impacting the mission and priorities of your organization. So it's not just a naval gazing exercise as we used to say, but it's also looking externally at what's happening and using that to guide what you put together. And you want to look at what the ability of the organization is to track and monitor outcomes so that you can really be measuring your impact as you go along. Ideally three to nine months is the right time. Once again, CCC OER is now into its second year, but we're making a lot of progress this year because number one, we collected a lot of data last year and we're really much more focused this year. So who are the stakeholders around setting up your strategic plan? So this is looking at it from two perspectives. One is from an educational nonprofit as the open education global is, which is CCC OER is part of that organization. And one is from an individual institution or could be a college district or an individual college. And if you look at these, there's a lot of similarity. There's a board of directors or it could be an executive governance board. And then there's the director and staff or the project leads for that OER project if it's at an institution. And then there's the folks that are really going to be affected by this. So it could be the organizational members in the case of a nonprofit. And it might be the faculty and staff and students at an educational institution. And so they're also very important and you should be getting their input, particularly looking for student input when possible as you're putting together that strategic plan. And in both cases, we have funders who should be involved in this process, but funders should not be controlling the process. They can certainly provide their input on what they hope to bring to the process, but they should be one of the stakeholders, but not the most important ones. All right. So how do you engage and get buy in from stakeholders? Well, it's really important to get those key stakeholders that we mentioned involved in the vision and mission. And the key questions around that are, what do we do? What is it that our organization or institution in this particular OER project is going to do? Who is it serving? Where do we do it? And how are we going to fund it? And there's going to be a variety of methods that are going to be used to achieve that. Could be surveys, could be electronic surveys or even paper surveys. And there should be a lot of active ways to do this through polls, interviews, focus groups, various types of interactive and a possible in-person, but certainly synchronous activities. And finally, reporting out to the rest of the organizational members about the steps and how it's coming along. And so here's an example of how we did this for CCCOER. We decided first up that we were going to use the SOAR planning framework. So that's the strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results framework instead of the more traditional SWAT framework. And that's because we really wanted to take a look at this from an appreciative inquiry perspective as opposed to the SWAT framework is a little bit more about worrying about your competition. We really wanted to look about what do we do well and how can we do that better. So that was our approach. And we did a lot of surveys out to both our executive council and our members. And we also had some in-person activities, fortunately at one of the conferences last year when many of our members were available to work on the vision and mission of our organization. In addition to that, there was interviews primarily with external stakeholders, a lot of polling at various synchronous meetings that we held that we hold throughout the year. And now I'm going to turn this over to Sue Tashji and who is going to take you through the process that we followed. Thank you. CCCOER use the SOAR framework, which differs somewhat from the more common SWAT framework. Rather than a focus on weaknesses and threats from external sources, SOAR focuses on opportunities and aspirations. The first step in the process is appreciative inquiry, where you ask your key stakeholders to identify the strengths of the organization. What are we already doing well and what can we build on? Opportunities, what are stakeholders asking for? How can we meet their needs? Aspirations, what are we passionate about? Where should we go in the future? And results, how might this be measured and how do we know when we are succeeding? We utilize the SOAR framework through a variety of activities that Una mentioned previously. We use surveys, visioning activities, online polling, and finally interviews with key stakeholders. So, at the end of the process, you should have a number of things in place because the strategic plan is really like a roadmap for your organization. And so the first thing that you need to have is your goals. And those goals should be smart goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Those are really important things to include in your goals and characteristics of your goals so that you will have a really good idea of what you want to accomplish. Then within those smart goals, you should write a preamble so that you have a description of what that goal is for the organization and you can elaborate on it. And then develop objectives to meet those goals. And with those objectives, you want to identify the priority of this goal or of these objectives to meet the goals. You would want to establish a timeline, identify who's responsible for organizing and meeting those objectives towards the goal, and then what completion looks like. And so with these objectives, you should have a project or an action plan for meeting those objectives and identify milestones along the way so that you're able to take stock of where you are in meeting the objectives so that you can then of course meet the goals. This is an example of one of our goals, which was determine the current state and build awareness of OER within the Maricopa Community Colleges. And this was for our Maricopa Millions project. And so you see, we have a number of objectives or activities to meet that goal. And we've identified who the responsible party is through accountability. We've included additional information we might need, how we were going to measure it. And we also identified challenges that we might face, established timeline, and also determined if there was a cost for doing each of those objectives or activities. And so that's one way that this can look. This is an example from an e-learning strategic plan that specifically included a goal or an objective, I'm sorry, for formalizing advanced technical support strategies for our open LMS, which is called MOAR. And it is an adaptation of my open math. And with this, you'll see that we have a preamble here on that specific objective or goal. And these are, we had a bigger goal and this is a smaller objective. So we have our due dates, we identified our timeline, we have where, how we're going to assess it, and how we measure how complete it is and what that would look like at completion. How will the resulting plan be used and by whom? Well, as you can see from this slide, the plan will be used by everyone that is affiliated with the organization. The executive council or board of directors, committees and subcommittees will use the plan when they're planning activities, events, professional development, and community members and stakeholders. The resulting plan gives you a place to record and reflect on your mission and values, as well as your short and long term goals. As Lisa mentioned earlier, think of your strategic plan as a living document, something that you can go back and make changes to if necessary, as things evolve both in and outside of the organization. The strategic plan will drive the organization and guide the work. The plan is used by all stakeholders to establish a direction for the organization. At CCCOER, we've learned so much through the strategic planning process that has involved all of our stakeholders, and we are really excited to share the resulting plan with the community and use it to guide our work for the next set. The strategic plan should be a living document. Those working on the plan should thoroughly understand the mission and vision of the organization and have a working knowledge of the goals. You want to be sure to assess the impact of the strategic plan and movement towards having worked the plan. At regular meetings, the status of those objectives and activities currently being worked on should be shared. Leadership should identify any obstacles the teams working on those objectives are facing and determine ways to help them, whether it be human or financial resources, conducting research, or paving the way through policies and procedures. During these status updates for those objectives and goals implemented, immediate data collection, when necessary, should be applied and when data is available. Since performance indicators or benchmarks would have already been identified, comparisons towards those benchmarks and against the KPIs, those indicators, should be made. This helps to measure the impact of the objectives implemented to meet the goal. Additionally, work towards completion should also be measured. If milestones were established at key points in the project plan for meeting the objectives, the percentage of the project completed should be able to be shared. As a practice, I visit my strategic plan quarterly to update it, to ensure the teams working on objectives are making the progress towards our goals, and to determine the impact of those strategies already implemented. As objectives are completed or delayed, I revisit it to determine the timeline and milestones established to determine if schedules and deliverables must be modified. Annually, the teams revisit the strategic plan, conduct SOAR analyses to determine gaps in the needs of the institution that are not included in the strategic plan, and to update it as needed. Well, thank you, Lisa and Sue, for sharing how you measure the impact and update your strategic planning over time and who is involved in that out of our key stakeholders that we talked about earlier. Well, we want to thank you very much for joining us for this session on strategic planning, cheating your vision and avoiding the pitfalls. Please feel free to connect with us. Our Twitter handles are up here. We'd also enjoy speaking with you in OEG Connect during the conference week, November 16th through 20th, and we invite you to join our community email, which you can find on our website at the link above to stay in touch with us on what we're doing with around OER, and we'd love to hear more about your projects as well. So, thank you again, and here also are our email addresses if you would like to contact us that way. Thanks again, and I hope you're enjoying OE Global 2020.