Strategic Planning Made Simple

Have you ever wondered if the things you’re focused on at work are the right things? Do your teams understand how the work they do fits into the office’s larger goals, or the institution’s? Engaging in strategic planning can help with both of those questions, but it’s always seemed a little daunting. In this episode we talk to Dani Ambrose and Dr. Kelley Jenkins from the University of Mississippi about a simplified approach to strategic planning that is accessible to all, extensible, and can be used by everyone from individuals, teams, to your entire office.      

Key Takeaways:

• Strategic planning is about identifying where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go. It’s as simple as that. 
• Start slowly: don’t try to eat the whole elephant in one bite. It’s important to listen first, get your team talking, and then guide them through using various tools to help surface strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, values, and areas of focus. 

Host:

Doug McKenna, University Registrar
George Mason University
cmckenn@gmu.edu 

Guests:

Dani Ambrose, Registrar
University of Mississippi Main Campus
deambros@olemiss.edu 

Dr. Kelley Jenkins, Associate Registrar
University of Mississippi Main Campus
kdjames@olemiss.edu 

References and Additional Information:

Strategic Planning and Assessment Worksheets (tools described in the episode)

Collaborative Assessment and Strategic Planning (2024 Annual Meeting Presentation)

AACRAO Core Competencies - Change Management

AACRAO Core Competencies - Leadership & Management

AACRAO Professional Proficiencies - Records and Academic Services

Transcript

0:00

You're listening to for the record, a registrar podcast sponsored by Acro. I'm Danny Ambrose Registrar at the University of Mississippi main campus and I'm Doctor Kelly Jenkins, associate registrar at the University of Mississippi main campus. And this is strategic planning. Made simple. Hello, welcome for the Record. I'm your host, Doug mckenna University Registrar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Have you ever stopped to wonder whether the things your office is focused on are the things that your office should be focused on. And by that, I mean, the things that are going to return the greatest result for the largest number of people, or maybe you've wondered how or whether at all the work your office or team is doing aligns with and supports the university's initiatives and how might you even go about answering these kinds of questions? These things have weighed on me in the past. And so that's why I'm excited about today's conversation. We're going to talk about ways to make strategic planning simple, if not easy. And so let's bring on our guests for today from the University of Mississippi, Danny Ambrose and Kelly Jenkins.-- Danny Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Thank-- you. We're glad to be here.-- I'm very happy to be-- here and I'll be very honest with you right up front. Strategic planning is not a topic that I thought I would be excited to talk about. But after coming to your presentation at the annual meeting in Columbus, I knew that this was important. And so thank you for agreeing to be guests and share your knowledge and experiences with us with the membership with the listenership. Thanks for inviting us.-- So,-- before we jump into the world of strategic planning and ongoing assessment, would you introduce yourselves? Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and then maybe a little bit about your institution, its enrollment locations, student information system, any other little tidbits that make Ole Miss home? And that is, I've said that now University of Mississ, Mississippi is Ole Miss, right? And so maybe, maybe a little explanation there too of like, how did I get that way? I actually know that one because I read it the other day, Kelly's our historian because she's been at the institution a lot longer than I have. But yeah, so I've been in higher education for almost 20 years now and I, I'm currently serving as a registrar at the University of Mississippi or old Miss. I was reading the other day that Ole Miss was actually a, they were trying to figure out what to call the yearbook and it was what, uh, what, what won that competition. And so that's what they call the yearbook and then it just kind of, um, was adopted and that's what they call. It's not the institution. It's a different ideal. Yeah, it's our nickname and kind of, it leans more toward athletics. So usually when they're talking football, baseball it's Ole Miss. And then when you talk about the academic side it's referred to more as the University of Mississippi, unless you're from Mississippi. And then it's just, it's always Ole Miss, both sides. Right. There's no distinction and it really is having been here. I grew up here in Oxford and, um, attended Ole Miss as an undergrad, immediately started working in Higher Ed in the registrar's office and I've been working professionally on campus for 17 years now, almost 17 years, all at the same institution all at the University of Mississippi. And it really is a way of life for us. You bleed red and blue when you've been here this long. It's, and especially, you know, you hear it in sec schools, you live and die by your sports team. Um, and so it's, it's one of my favorite places in the world to be. I don't see myself anywhere else because it's just so ingrained and you may hear hotty toddy associated with Ole Miss. Uh, it's not only a cheer we do, uh, at all sporting events and in the grove, but it's also a Greeting. So, anytime I'm on vacation, whether it's a cruise, it's Disney World at the beach. If somebody sees Ole Miss, they're gonna yell hotty toddy at you. And the correct response is always hotty toddy. So, you know, you identify other Ole Miss people with hotty toddy. That's so great. I, I'm in the DC metro area and I went to Michigan State for my master's degree and my wife went to Michigan State as an undergrad. And so we have a bunch of spartan gear and same thing. Like, anytime anybody sees this out, somebody's, like, go green and it's, it's weird to be accosted with go green from, like, across a shopping center or something. And you're like, sometimes I forget too, like what I'm wearing some. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Got it. Got it.-- That's the first-- time I traveled for work I forgot and I was in the airport and some other city wasn't even Memphis and somebody yelled it and I was like, what are they? Oh, they're yelling at me. Oh, I was supposed to say something. Yeah. So, tell me a little bit about University of Mississippi. We have 21,500 students just over that. And, um, we are a liberal arts institution. Uh, we do have a law school and a pharmacy and nine total colleges. The College of Liberal Arts and then the rest are schools like school of business school of education, things like that. Yeah. So we're very well rounded university.-- Uh We are a R one research institution flagship-- of the state. Fantastic. What student information system do you use?-- That's tricky-- right now that we're in the middle of a um we're in the middle of transitioning or choosing a new student information system. So up in the air, got it. So let's start big and maybe sort of a broad question to kick us off. What is strategic planning and why is it important for your office or your unit or your team to engage in strategic planning? Yeah, so I think for me, strategic planning really comes down to understanding what it is you want to do and how you want to get there. And it's as simple as that because when you try to overcomplicate it, it makes it seem like something that is almost unreachable for most people. So I really boil it down to that. Although when you read online and when you look at the textbook, there's a lot more to strategic planning, you know, talking about establishing direction and purpose and setting goals and knowing how to budget and all those things go into strategic planning. But in my simple world of strategic planning, it's really about understanding who we are, what we do and where we want to go and how we're going to get there. So, and, and I think it's important for offices and team units to embrace strategic planning because while institutions do it at an overarching level. Often times, I don't think the individual staff in our departments really connect with that. And so how do they see themselves as part of that strategic plan if they're not connecting with it? And oftentimes we're just like, well, that's our university strategic plan and that's what we work towards. But what does that really mean? And I don't think we really embrace what that means. So, bringing it down to the department level and breaking it down and getting the staff involved in that process, I think, helps them connect the work they do to the success of the institution in a more tangible way, right? And, and being involved with the actual process is something that was new to me. Um Going through this when I, when I came on board last year, I've always said here's our strategic plan, figure out how we're going to meet these goals and you're going, where did this come from? Why is this a priority? I've never even heard of this, you know, those kind of things. So being able to involve our team in developing, where are we, where do we want to go? How do we think we should get there? It gives you that buy in because if you just plop something down in front of someone and say, OK, here's what I need you to accomplish. They don't internalize those goals as much as if they help develop them. So it really, it really works really well with our team because a lot of times I think the registrar looks at themselves kind of as a silo where we click these buttons and we produce these transcripts and we do these things, but we don't realize how our efforts play into the overall efforts. Um going back to what Danny was saying of the university. So if retention is a strategic goal of the university, if we really delve into what the registrar does, we're critical to student retention. Um But understanding that um I kind of look at it as the old saying, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time when you see these big overreaching goals of the university that can be very daunting. But when we break it down and say, OK, as a registrar's office, here's what we do. How do we help meet this goal? Those small bite size pieces make it so much more manageable. It gets you that buy in from your team and they really get more passionate about what they're doing in achieving those goals because they help develop them and said, yeah, this is where we are, this is the issues we see in our day to day work, how can we make them better? And it was just a really interesting process to see our team grow and mature and see different issues from all. It just was really a neat process and I think that's one of the keys to it, as well as, as the staff begin to engage with it, they come up with ideas that are actually more effective than what the leadership could come up with on their own. And so by engaging them, you're, you're actually building a stronger, more stable strategic plan, I think. Yeah, I've been involved with, you know, sort of implementing institutional strategic plans. I haven't been involved specifically with this approach of a ground up sort of strategic plan, creation development and uh localization. And so maybe let's talk a little bit about sort of what the impetus was for you. When you and Danny, you said you've been at almost how long? Yeah, for two years. And so when you arrived and sort of we're going through an initial assessment, what was that process like? And then what led to this sort of dare I say, simplified approach to strategic planning within your office? Yeah, so it actually goes back way further than two years for me. So like I said, I've been in higher education for, for almost 20 years and when I started as a full time employee, so I started as student assistant and when I started as a full time employee, I actually had the privilege of working under a really amazing registrar and he had a completely different approach than I've actually experienced since then. And probably one of my most favorite registrars to have ever worked with and I learned a lot from him and I think that's where some of this comes from because, you know, as a staff member, getting to be involved in the strategic planning process was eye opening. And so then when I became a registrar, so I've worked at five different institutions, four on the west coast and then now one in Mississippi. And when I became a registrar at the third institution I worked at, um I started to be able to implement some of these things. And as we were going through the strategic planning process, like I'm a business major, I majored in business management and a minor in economics. And so I have a foundation in that. And what happened was is I was trying to, I was explaining strategic planning to the team because I really wanted them to be involved because it meant a lot to me when I was involved and trying to develop that, that culture of inclusivity in that planning process. And after one meeting, I was talking to a staff member and I was asking how she felt about it. And she said, you know, you use a lot of big words and you talk about things I don't understand and it makes me sometimes it makes me feel dumb and I don't want to ask questions. And I was like, that's really amazing feedback. Actually, I'm glad you felt brave enough to share that with me, but it made me think it got, got me thinking about why do we have to talk about it in these terms? That really if you went to business school, you might understand and you might remember, right? So why can't we take strategic planning and make it something that everyone can understand and everyone can, can grasp and get rid of the big terms and get rid of the fancy language and just talk about it for what it is. And so that's kind of what launched on this. Well, let's simplify strategic planning. And so every institution I've worked at from that point on, I've tried to refine this process. And so when I showed up at Ole Miss, and one of the first things I do is is spend a lot of time, you know, listening and talking to staff. And so the initial engagement with strategic planning is always through one on ones with staff. And I immediately set up all staff meetings on a regular basis. So we meet every, every week, one time a week for an hour, we close the office, we all get together, we chat just to try to get a pulse for where the team is and understand what their needs are. And you know, what level of engagement we're working with. And then once, you know, we established that, I mean, we sat through a lot of um a lot of very quiet meetings just trying to get people to talk and engage with each other, let alone with strategic planning. We hadn't even gotten there yet. How many, how many team members do you have?-- How big is your staff?-- We have a staff of 19 and that includes both of us in our full leadership team. So total. Yeah. And you know, I've done my previous institution had 35 and I've done this with teams of seven. So doesn't this works, doesn't matter how big your team is. I'll say that, but a lot of it comes down to just having conversations and, and, and understanding where the teams at. And so that's where the three basic questions come from. You know, where are we now? Where have we been? And where do we want to go? And, and I really think those are the foundation little questions to strategic planning and if you can sit down and have conversations with your team and just really understand, well, what is it that we're doing and what is our role? And what does that role mean to the institution? And even if it's just throwing words on a white board that says, ok, well, we register students, we drop students, we, we change grades, we update majors, you know, what are all the, the functional things that we do? And how does that then relate to what the institution is doing as a whole?-- And that in itself is an eye opening conversation with staff.-- Absolutely. And one thing going back to the first, the first few all team meetings. Danny came in July. I returned to the registrar's office in August. That same year I had done a stint in one of the academic units, um, and then came back to the registrar's office. Um, and they were looking at me like, well, it's about time you came home, um, has gone for nine years. I did seven years, went to the dean's office for nine years and then came back. I love to talk. Um, my husband and I are very different. He's very quiet, very laid back. And I'm like the energizer buddy. Hey, how's it going? Da da da da. Those meetings were painful to start with. So that's one thing as a leader. And I, I wasn't even in the leadership position when I first came back, but as a leader, you can't be afraid to have those painful meetings. There were times Danny would ask a question and literally just stare at us for an hour because no one felt comfortable sharing. And for someone who doesn't like silence, it was so hard for me to go. You can't be the only one that talks. I would throw something in and then everybody would just sit there and we would look at each other and it's painful. But sometimes that's what you have to go through for your team to realize it's ok to voice my concerns. It's ok to give my perspective. I'm sure that even there, there's sort of a dawning comprehension there that too like, oh you're waiting for my input. And so my input is valuable. My input is valuable.-- I know things I should be able to share things like a-- light bulb went on after, after so long. And um we also, and we'll talk about this more later, gather feedback through what we call roast from our team. And some of the pieces of feedback we got where we feel heard, feel understood. And a lot of times I know staff members don't get that. They don't feel like the leadership wants to know their opinion. Well, as far as I'm concerned, they're my subject matter experts. They're the ones doing it every day. If there's a barrier that's keeping you from being effective and efficient in serving our constituents, we want to know that and we want to help first. We want to say, how do you see a solution? So anytime and, and Danny's really good about this and I'm working on it when a staff member comes in and says, here's a problem. OK. How do you think we should fix it? Don't bring us a problem unless you have an idea of how to fix it and then we can, you know, start the conversation there. So it's really empowered our team to look at what they do and find ways to do it better and giving them the strength and ability to come and say, hey, I see this issue. Here's how I think we can fix it rather than just letting it sit and, and usually get worse unfortunately, but I'm, I'm really proud of the strides our team has made to be willing to say, hey, this is an issue. Here's how I think we should fix it and, and bring that to us. That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit about some of these things. You, you mentioned specifically having all staff meetings, some one on ones leadership team meetings and then you've made reference to these activities or this process works. What's the process? What are those activities? Very organic. That's what I like to call it because I don't, there's no cookie cutter process under this model that really works for every institution the same way. And so I feel like, you know, as a leader when you go in and you start assessing, OK, where's the team at? And you know, are we ready for these conversations? What conversations are we ready for? That's where you begin to develop your plan for approaching the strategic planning process. And so walking them through those three basic questions is, is the first step regardless, you know, where we at, where have we been and where do we want to go and really diving into those, those questions and not surface, right? Like when you get to the, you know, where have we been? Like, let them talk about the struggles they've had, let them talk about the successes they've had and then ask the deeper questions like, OK, well, you've said that you've tried this in the past, tell me what that looked like. Give me more information, right? So learn to ask a lot of questions. And when you dive into the, where do we want to go? Treat it like a dreaming moment, right? Almost like future state reimagined cotton when you're implementing a new software system. But on the strategic planning level where it's like, OK, if we could be any types of registrar's office that we want to be, and if we could just design this from scratch, what would it look like and go from there or what are things that you've wanted to happen for a long time that you've never been able to do, but you think would make your job a lot better and so kind of going down that path. But then we use tools so that some of the tools that we reference are we do team swat analysis. So strength sweetness is opportunity threats. And we do that as a team and we talk about and typically that's part of answering the question of where are we now? And we do a risk assessment and I actually do these on different levels. So we'll do a team level, we'll do a level and we'll do individual levels. So when we get the SWAT analysis at an individual level we actually modify it to be strengths and opportunities as an individual and then strengths and opportunities within the team. And what that looks like is, you know, here's my individual strengths that I believe could benefit the team. And here are the opportunities that I have either to develop in the team or to be more engaged in the team or, you know, at the team level. Here's my opportunities and then the risk assessments are actually, I think more telling than everything else. And it's simply basically, I do very basic handouts. And so take a sheet of paper and draw three rectangles that are hot dog style across the page and stack them on top of each other. And the first one, you write high risk and the second one, you write medium risk and the third one, you write low risk and then you're like at the team level we talk about, ok, what do we believe are our high risk, medium risk, low risk things that we do? And the same thing goes for as an individual in your position, what are your high risk, medium risk, low risk things that you do? Right. And so one of the things that really stands out in my mind when I first got here was we did the risk assessment at the leadership level. And one of the things that hit high risk was the receptionist position that answering phones and answering questions was high risk. And So I started asking questions about that because you don't typically see that position fall in high risk, right? Like in my mind, I'm thinking that, you know, in ac or, you know, enrollment, those really high things and those were falling down into low risk. And I was like, this is not making any sense to me, but it's about your perception of risk, right? So what I learned was is that they were perceiving risk in the, in the receptionist position as high because they had moments or individual isolated incidents where something bad happened and it didn't end well or it was complicated or, yeah. So it just didn't, didn't go well. And so, but things were going well with reporting, right? Things were going well with compliance. So that was low risk. So what we ended up having to do is having, have conversations about how to reorient risk and what risk actually meant so that we could understand where our high risk, medium risk, low risk things actually were not where they were based on our experiences or isolated incidents or about individuals, feelings about those particular. Yeah, because often times you find, oh, well, this is actually a training issue. It's not a risk issue. It's a training issue. And, um, and that opens a whole another can of worms, right? So, but it helps you identify. Ok. Well, where do we need to go? Right. Well, here's some things that we need to change. And one time I had a conversation about where do we need to go after having, you know, where are we and where have we been? And the answer was with the first two, where are we, where have we been? There was all these issues and everything else and then we get to the, where do we want to go? And we're like, no, we don't want to. We're good. We're good where we're at. Everything's good. And like, oh, well, there's another like interesting red flag. So now we have to, to address that, right? But keeping it organic, gives you more insight to your team and then you can kind of progress through strategic planning and in whatever order makes sense for your team. And I was just thinking, it's not a linear process. You do this, then you do this, then you do this and our happened very organically because you would think, oh, we need to establish our mission first and our vision and then we'll develop all these other things and that's not how it worked um in our process. In fact, while doing our SWAT analysis and those dreaming big moments, our team identified our focus areas that we felt as a team we needed to focus on as an office. So those actually came first. And then we took that information that the team developed into leadership retreat. And from that said, OK, this is what our office wants to stand for and from there did our mission vision values, um our focus areas and then started developing goals and benchmarks based on those four areas that we came in with from our team. So it, you may backtrack, you may think. Oh, well, this should be the first part, but it may not necessarily be for your team. It came about very organically that they were like, well, this is what we do. This is what we should do better. This, this is how we need to improve ourselves. So they hit those. Here's where we are, here's where we want to be. Here's where we feel like we need to focus our efforts in order to achieve those. Then we backtracked and um developed the, the overall ambition vision values for the registrar's office. What was the timing like for that where it sounds pretty simple, straightforward. We figured these out, we figured those out, then we identified this. So that's like 12 meetings. Yeah. Right. And so let's dig into that. This is an iterative process. I, I assume also, well, you don't want to burn your staff out with it either. Right. So, like I said, we meet once a week as a staff as a full team for an hour and, but we don't talk about strategic planning every week. Sometimes we'll do trainings on a software tool or something or we'll talk about a process or we'll switch it up and we'll say, ok, today, we're gonna do um process mapping and we'll take three processes, divide the team into 33 groups. And um there'll be someone in each team that is associated with that process and then other people who maybe aren't as familiar with that process and they walk through and I identify. So it's still part of strategic planning because you're doing the assessment piece. But it's not like, hey, we're doing strategic planning today and here's the component we're accomplishing. It's more like work group stuff. And so, or we'll just, we'll talk about what's happening. And so, but you need to break it up because otherwise you'll bring your team out. Um And so we, we spent a lot of time in the early stages really just getting to know the team and talking more about. So, like in the first three months, we probably talked more about who we were, what we wanted to stand for, how our work impacted those around us because we had to, we had to get out of the thinking of. Here's the work that I do and start thinking about or, and here's how I do that work and start thinking about. Here's the work that I do and here's how that work impacts everything else because we weren't thinking big picture enough, we weren't thinking holistic record. And so we had to kind of change that way, that way of thinking. And so that's why I think it's different for every team is because depending on where you start. Um One team I worked with, we were able to within the first three months, dive in and build a strategic plan. Within two weeks, we had a fully formed strategic plan, but that's because that team was at a different place and we could do more of a start to finish exercise on strategic plan. Whereas our current team, we weren't there because nobody had ever participated in a strate strategic planning process before. Um So it's very different. And so then as you go along, so like what Kelly was saying is we kind of started backwards, we started with our focus areas because as we started to talk about our strengths and our weaknesses. As a team, we started to see some themes. And so we're like, ok, well, what things are you and we started asking questions and they started connecting with it. And even though like we identified one very quickly, which was communication and the team even came back and said, hey, here's all the different things that we could do to improve our communication. Can we start on some of them? And I was like, sure, tell me where you want to start, give me a plan and let's go from there. And we have at least two different individuals through the first six months of this process, come back with fully fledged plans for developing communication in, in specific areas within our office. And I think both of those have successfully made changes um within our processes and our procedures that impact not just our office, but other departments around campus within the last year.-- So-- that's got to feel so good for them to, to be empowered to do that and to think it through and work something, work a problem through and then present it and have you be like, yes, do that done. And then it's also got to be great for you because you don't have to do that. Like they've done it, they take care, right? And so they're just, they're excited to do it and then they own their job more and then the things that they do and the issues that they run into, they're like, hey, now I have this other issue, here's how I'd like to solve it. Um And with one team, we've actually had them come back and give us additional solutions to things and we're like, yeah, OK. That works, you know, but they get excited and like, we don't have to, why make your job harder as a leader, right? That's, that's what I think and our team can help make our jobs easier, just like we can help make their jobs easier. And this process really brings that to light and it creates that more team. We're, we're a team and we can do this and you can be empowered to do your job and I can be empowered to do my job and I don't have to be up in your business. Right. Yeah. And they've, even, one group has even, they tried, they piloted something with one area, then applied that same process to a different area and have made, you know, two different improvements in, in, in, in different areas of the office and have actually been able to present on it. Um, so they went to, uh, a conference and were able to present well, here, here's the process we use to revamp this and it's really gone a long way to not only bring our focus to what we do as a registrar's office, but also building those relationships across campus with our advising offices in the schools and the college. Um So it's, you know, fostering those relationships leading us to be, oh, the registrar knows the answer to this question. Let's reach out to them instead of just guessing and telling the students something and not, not in it. You know, it's built those relationships to where they know what we and they're more comfortable coming to us. Um outside constituents, not just within our office, but across campus, they're coming to ask questions of us to make sure we're serving students in the best way possible.-- And-- you might think that doing strategic planning in this disconnected way would end with a disconnected strategic plan, right? Because you're not doing a very linear process of here's our mission, vision values, goals now let's set our benchmarks and achieve them, right? But what ends up happening is if you're paying attention to what your values are, and when you develop those, and if, as you develop your missions, because our our our focus areas came first. And so as we developed our mission, we wanted to be very intentional that our focus areas were represented in our mission, right? Because if we weren't representing those, then why were they our focus areas, right? And it doesn't matter whether you do your mission first or your focus areas first. Like if you do your mission first, then you're going to build your focus areas to make sure that they're still represented in your mission, right? They should all tie together and they do, they do end up doing that if you're paying attention and when you start to pull something in that might feel disconnected and you start asking questions about it. Sometimes you find, oh, there's actually a connection I didn't see or hey, maybe this isn't the thing for now, but let's let's document this and let's let's put it on a shelf and let's come back to it because maybe we're not ready for it yet. And so you're keeping those ideas, but you're, you're not allowing it to disconnect the process, right? So that when you finally end up with the full package of your mission, vision values, goals, um that it's cohesive and, and so that you have to be very mind that throughout the process because you could easily come up with, well, here's our mission, but it has nothing to do with our values and you don't want that. But I do think that's one of the strengths of doing this very organically. And we do, we circle back often and you have to get really good at asking questions, right? And one thing that I love that we did that really kept our team informed. So we built these focus areas first. Then we went into leadership and developed mission vision values. We took those right back to our full team because there again, well, y'all only listened up until this point. And then you said, here's what we're gonna do with it. No, we took that, that we developed as a leadership team back to full team and said, OK, guys, we listen to what you said, here's what we've come up with. What do you think? What is your feedback? How do we tweak this? Are we really hitting at what we need to be as an office? Yeah, I wanna dive in a little bit more to the actual methods you use to develop your focus areas and what that process looked like. I think that that's a little bit of Morphus at the moment in my brain. And so how does that work? And how is it different than the SWAT analysis and the, the tool that you put together to you know, it's not the hot dog chart anymore. Now we've moved on to.-- So-- it's funny enough. It's, they're, they're all very similar. So it really is. Our focus areas were born out of our SWAT analysis actually. So when we did the strengths and opportunities, our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, um, what we began to see in those four quadrants was the threat of communication. Right. We had strengths in communication or we didn't, right? We had weaknesses, communication or we didn't. And as we started talking about what we were saying were our strengths and what we were saying were our weaknesses and where our opportunities were and what might challenge that that's where we started seeing. Ok. Well, communication is something that it looks like we, we need to work on, right? We're good here. We're not so great here. But if we could improve our communication, maybe we would have less of these challenges or weaknesses or communication is a solution to a threat, right? We, we realized that our industry knowledge wasn't where it should be, it wasn't a strength, it was a weakness and an opportunity, right? So, but we also realized that we could be better if we could develop more broad knowledge in, in, in our industry. And um technology, we realized that one of our strengths I think had to do with the record. I'm forgetting what it was specifically, but it had to do with documentation, but it was kind of a miss or a skewed strength. And so we, we realized our weakness was that we were very paper heavy, right? I can't remember what the strength was that we came up with, but it triggered paper heavy. And so they're like, well, we want to go more electronic and I think it had to do with our transcripts. The way we process transcripts is, is what I remember. And so we pulled all of our focus areas out of our SWAT analysis. And who did that when you say we pulled, was that the leadership team? So, so imagine a classroom, we actually leave our office and we go to a classroom for our team meetings. Um because it's a space that's available, there's white boards and we draw the SWAT analysis on the white board, we draw the grid and we just say, OK, tell me what you think our strengths as a department are and they'll start throwing things out and I'll start writing them on the board and, you know, tell me what your weak, our weaknesses are and they'll throw them out. And this is why it's important to get them talking first because you can't have this conversation. If your team isn't communicating, they're not going to throw these ideas out. So you can't go in day one and say we're going to do a swot analysis and come out with anything tangible, right? You might write crickets on the board or but so they, they do this with us and then I start asking questions or Kelly or whoever's, you know, mediating or facilitating the, the discussion will start asking questions about what's, what's on the board, what we put on the board. Um And it could be as simple as well. What, what themes are you seeing? Anything stand out to you? What on here is the most important thing for you, right? If you had to pick one thing, that's the most important thing on here, what would it be? And communication was, was that one thing that kept coming up? Um And I was trying to remember what our fourth pillar was.-- Communication, industry, knowledge, technology, and-- building relationships, collaboration. Yes. Cross campus collaboration. Yeah. So, or partnerships. That's how we worded it. And so, you know, they identified those things they did through discussion. The other thing we do is like in the leadership meeting, for example, we came up with our values and how we, how we did that was again, white board. And, and I said, OK, well, what are the things that we value? And we just started writing all these words down on the board and then we started grouping those words. Um Well, what words are similar or what, what do we think? What does this word mean to you versus this word? And if there was too much correlation or, or where they overlapped enough, we group them together and we did that a couple of times. So we had like three or four different renderings of what these groups could look like until we settled on something that we, we were all like, yeah, this feels good and we wouldn't change anything. And then we said, OK, well, within these groups, what's the one word that really represents those groups? And that's how we narrowed it down to our five core values.-- So-- you basically did a thematic analysis of those. Nice, love it. And I love how interactive this process is as well and how inclusive because as you mentioned, you can't stand at a board and do a swat analysis for the unit without their buy in and participation. Otherwise, the whole thing is like, well, why don't I just go to my office and write up what I think and then, you know, we'll go through and implement that. So I love that it's inclusive, interactive iterative. Let's find another I word, insightful. Those types of qualities associated with this are again, like really exciting to think about in terms of strategic planning for the team, for the unit, for your office. Overall, the focus on partnerships and collaboration across campus are also so critical because the registrar's office doesn't exist in a silo and we provide service and report to so many aspects of the campus community that it's just so important that we be engaged and involved and out there, there's involved, there's another I word. So we'll do that. I had more questions, but I want to make sure that we touch on sort of uh and reiterate the process as it exists or as you used it because like you said, there's not a cookie cutter process, but I want to make sure that we have highlighted for people so that as they're listening at home, they think, OK, start with listening sessions, start with uh team meetings, one on ones, leadership meetings, move through this strengths, opportunities move through and obviously, again, not linear, but like these are the sort of buckets, identify focus areas, identify values, make sure that your values are supporting the things that you're focused on. And then coming up with your mission and vision also needs to be that connected process and interactive process. Uh so that you're not like doing all of this work and then sailing away with a different mission or vision, what else happens in the process? And then one key piece that I haven't heard a lot about is where are the points throughout this process where this is being documented and sort of who's writing this down and where does it live? Yeah, I was just thinking about that as you were talking because I think one of the things that we, we actually didn't talk about at the ACRO presentation is what happens behind the scenes, right? So what I suggest and, and this is the approach I take is I know what a strategic plan needs to have, right? So it's almost like taking a template for a business plan or a strategic plan, right? So get your template set and you're going to have even if it's just on a word document or on your ipad or somewhere, create your template as a leader and you know, have your, you know, here's our strategic plan for the office of the University Registrar and here's our mission and here's our vision and include all the elements that you want represented in this document. You're just doing the titles and the headings, you're not putting any of the body in it. So as you work through this process with your team, and let's say you, you hit on your focus areas, fill in that section and then go back to the team and let's say you do your vision, fill in that section and you do it as you go. And so you're basically writing your strategic plan report as you work with your team. And then, and that's where your document. So you as the leader are documenting that in a, in a full document. And what that helps you do is keep track of what have we done and what haven't we done and what do we still have left to accomplish because you've got to have a checklist somewhere. Right. Right. Your team doesn't need to see that necessarily not right away, but they will eventually. So what we ended up doing to help because the other thing is, is like, show don't tell, right? And so how do you show the team the progress they're making? And so we actually worked with our Marcom once our, our marketing communications office, once we had our mission vision values and focus areas and we gave that information to them and they developed an inf that represented our mission vision values and focus areas as the University Register's office. And that is a principal document that we can share or using a powerpoint or whatever we want to do with it. But it represents the work that we've done. And that was kind of cool, I think for people to see that for the staff to see that. And we, we don't, we're not like in your face with strategic planning. So it's not like we're always throwing that up, we're always talking about it, but we can circle back to it when needed. And so we'll send that information to them in emails or we'll share it at the all team meetings. But I keep a document to make sure I know where we're at. And so for instance, like, let's say we need to, we've got goals that we need to accomplish in a year because we're still in the middle of the process, right? So, but you know what those goals are and so you might write a goal while you're still writing your mission as long as those two still work together, it makes sense that you have that goal, right? So that's the check that you want to do. So, like we did a goal early early on when it was just our, our focus areas that, that had to do with partnerships. And so, so we made sure that we documented that goal and that one I was more nervous about because I've never done one so early in the process. But it turned out really well anyways and it worked and it was very cohesive with the overall strategic plan. Now, we're still writing our strategic plan and we're um a year and a half in to this whole process um at Ole Miss. And so, but, you know, we'll, we'll build a goal and then we'll document it in that document. And so I know exactly where we are in the process. I don't even think I've ever shared the document with Kelly to be honest, because what the team needs to know is, hey, we're doing good things, right? They're not so much focused on that document, but I need that document at the end of the year to turn it in, right? And, and it's my responsibility as a leader to ensure that we're covering everything that needs to be covered in our plan that we're building it out as thoroughly as it needs to be. So we use smart goals. Um I use that model, the smart goal model because it's easier to talk through the smart model with the team because it's one of the simplest ways to build goals that I've run into. And so we use that model and so we might have those goals out there and present for the team, but we're not giving them the whole document. At, at that time, someday we, we probably will when it's finished. And at the end of the year when I have to report it, I'll probably share that with the entire team. So they all know what it is and then they can look back and they'll find themselves in it, right? Because they're like, oh, I participated in that I helped that project be successful. So one of the things that you said about not being like in your face with strategic planning all the time, I think works because you have incorporated elements of it into sort of the, the regular functioning of meetings and interactions and the work of the office. And so it's not a thing that happens over there. It's like a thing that's ongoing and we're going to talk about it sometimes specifically or explicitly, but it's still happening even though we might not be talking about it, which I think also is just a mindset shift for, for me particular. But I think for a lot of people will be like, oh, we do this all the time and we just need to name it and claim it.-- So, yeah.-- And I think that's the biggest thing about keeping it simple. Right. Because otherwise it becomes this thing that you have to carve out time to do and then it's a burden when the reality of it is you're doing it every day. So why not just relate it appropriately to the strategic plan and document it as you go instead of feeling overwhelmed by it and be like, ok, now I have to sit down and come up with these things. It's way easier if you just live your strategic plan. Yeah,-- Kelly, you were gonna say something that I cut you off.-- No problem. Take a picture of your white boards. So as you're doing your swot analysis, as you're throwing out all these things that you do, because I know when we would work on this together, we would go. Now, what did we say? And we could go back to those pictures and say, oh yeah, I remember when we were talking about this. So I mean, we use some of those in our presentation. Um and they may just look like a jumbled mess, but when you look at them and you were there, it makes a whole lot more sense. And another thing that I want to kind of look back to that I mentioned earlier that we do with our team, we call them our registrar roasts. So we have a staff meeting. Uh We've done two so far where none of the leadership team goes, none of us participate. We assign one team member to be a mediator and we may have some questions we come up with or we just let them vent without any of the reg with. I, we have the leadership team in the room and then the documentarian writes it all up and presents it to us. Now, we let them know we're gonna listen to everything you say. We may not be able to act on everything, but we at least want to kind of keep our finger on the pulse of what is our team struggling with. What are they worrying about? And a lot of times they may not want to say that in front of or directly to one of our leadership team. So we give them that opportunity to be through our, our roast and we try to do those at least, you know, every quarter or so. We've done two so far and they've come back with, with really good information on what's actually happening in the office. That's very cool. I like it. Two final questions. One, what would you say to someone who might be at the very beginning stages of thinking about considering starting some strategic planning engagement. What advice would you give to them? So if I'm talking to a fellow registrar, I'll give them this one tip says, don't write your own mission, don't write your own mission, say more. So the mission I think is one of the hardest things that you can put together. And as a registrar's office and having worked at five different institutions, what I have learned from that and, you know, I would love to be challenged on this someday because I would love to have a whole conversation about this. But what I've learned about that is the register office, is the registrar's office, is the registrar's office. It doesn't necessarily matter what we do because we all do slightly different things. But the mission of the registrar's office can be pretty much the same everywhere you go. And if you go to the a Crow's handbook, the registrar's guide, best practices in the regs office. They're familiar. Yeah, there's a mission in there and it's perfect if you don't want to spend a lot of time. I mean, you can write your own mission but what's more important is the goals and getting to the goals and getting to the development portion. And so the mission that's in that book is at a high enough level and it is, there's only three points to it and they work for every registrar's office. So I would tell other registrars don't write your own mission, adopt that mission and go from there because it doesn't matter which direction you want to go, that mission's going to support it because if you spend your time on that, you're going to miss the critical stuff, which is everything else actually making the changes necessary for your office to be successful and support campus, focusing on your vision, your values, your goals, that mission can tie into of that very easily, regardless of which structure you go. At least that's what I think.-- Yeah,-- I couldn't agree more. I have been told horror stories of when I bring up strategic planning, people recoil because they have had bad experiences where they spent two hours words missing the mission statement. And that's it. That's what the that was the entirety of the strategic planning session. And that is so not it. And so I love that. Don't write a new one, just grab that one and then spend your time and energy developing your goals, your areas of focus, understanding how your values support those things-- down the road,-- write your own mission. But if you're just getting started, you want to figure it out. Yeah, if you need and you might just be like, like me where it's like, why, why bother going back to revisit that this one works really well. It gives me all the flexibility I need and I can focus on what matters. So, Kelly, what would you say?-- Don't-- get overwhelmed because I feel like when we start thinking of it, you have to start big picture and then start honing in on what and I, I love it the way we did it was we said, OK, here's everything we do. Then we dove down to. Ok, we do. Well, what do we do? Not so well, because if you try to do it, dive into that immediately, it's gonna overwhelm you and you're just gonna say, you know what, I'm just gonna make something up and stick it on there and be done with it. And that's not getting to the heart of what you need to make our offices effective and efficient. So don't let it overwhelm you some days you will be, feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall. Um trying to get everybody to talk. That was the hardest part I think for us was getting everybody the juices flowing and being willing to talk about everything. But like Danny said, weave it in a little bit at a time. Don't say we're gonna lock ourselves in a room for a week and when we get done, we're gonna have a strategic plan. You're literally going to want to pull your hair out. So if you weave it in, in little pieces of just day to day operations, it makes it so much easier and more organic and just flows a little, a little bit easier. So don't let your get overwhelmed and don't try to do it all in one sitting because that's just gonna-- complicate things-- and what will help with that is focusing on things that are relevant, right? So there might be a whole bunch of things that you could do. But if you choose the things that are relevant for your team. Now, they're going to engage more with it because they, they can connect with it faster. If you choose things that are going to be relevant in five years, that's going to be a struggle,-- right? It's huge disconnect already-- right away, right. Any closing thoughts on you said that you're still in the process of writing your strategic plan. And so I want to make sure that everybody who's listening understands that there's not a, there, there, it's a, it's a continual process. You will have a document at the end, but that's, it's never a finished document. Really, it's a living document honestly. And if you think about your strategic plan as a rolling document, that every year, what you're going to do is continually refine it. You will always have a five year plan because as you build out your initial five years and that's where your strategic plan is, you're going to continue to revise and revisit and build and adapt and adjust as necessary so that you will continue to have that five year plan. And it is very much living because you might have something come up like COVID and you might just have to pivot, right? But if you have the solid foundation and that's why I also say, don't write your own mission, choose that one mission. Because if you're not, if you don't have to rewrite your own mission every year and all you're doing is working towards a vision that really encompasses that mission and it's your goals that you're changing every year, right. So if our mission, part of our mission is to protect the integrity of the student record and the degrees that we work, right? It doesn't change if, if we are to distribute those records in accordance with all the policies and regulations that doesn't change. Right? So if that doesn't change, what does, and what's changing year to year are your individual goals on how you accomplish that mission or how you, how you build that vision? And we always joke about the acronym Kiss. Kiss. Keep it. Keep it simple. Silly. Now, you can plug other words in for the final. I've heard stupid. I've heard sweetheart. Um I try to keep it as nice as possible. I'm from the south. So sweetheart is probably the most, but that's the biggest thing is if you overcomplicate it, it makes it so much harder for you to get buy in and for your team to relate to it. Keep it simple. Sweetheart. That's the best thing. Yeah, I used to think that that people would look at me funny if I gave them just a simple piece of paper with a few lines and three words. And like, how could this tool be, be super useful or how could I this actually work? And then I realized that that's actually the most effective tool because the more your team as individuals get to interpret it and put their own thoughts in it, the more you understand them better and so less guidance sometimes gets you more. That's amazing. That was one thing that I took away from your session too was the simplicity of the tools is really critical and also just the ongoing engagement with everyone from your coordinators up through the entirety of the leadership team. So thank you both so much for being here and sharing your experiences with this and your expertise. Is it ok? If I include your contact information and then maybe I'll follow up and get if there's a PDF of the documents or some of the tools that we can post as part of the show notes as well. That'd be fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.-- So, thank you both so much. I appreciate it. Thank-- you. Thank you. I said it at the top of the episode. I didn't know that talking about strategic planning could be this engaging. And for that, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to Danny and Kelly for sharing their process and experience and for breaking strategic planning down into manageable components. There are aspects of their process that I'm definitely going to incorporate into my leadership and management of my office. We'll post links on the show notes, page to the tools that they talked about in case you're interested in using them with your office too. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, share it with a friend or a colleague and please do, let me know if you have ideas for episodes or feedback on episodes. I appreciate hearing from you. The summer is barreling along and it's not too soon to start thinking about fall 2024. Please. Please please be sure to confirm that you are registered to vote. November will be here before we know it. And voter registration deadlines vary from state to state, make a plan and go vote with your friends. Until next time, stretch your legs, drink some more water and be sure to take a moment each day just to appreciate the day. I'm Doug mckenna and this is for the record.