Strategic Planning Objectives Research Articles

Open Educational Resources: a regional university’s journey

In a region of geographically scattered, small island states, developing quality-enhanced learning materials across the hugely diverse, predominantly ocean-based learning and teaching environments, continues to present new challenges. This paper explores the potentially transformative nature of Open Educational Resources (OER) in a regional university. Against the backdrop of the bold, new Strategic Plan 2013–2018, University of the South Pacific (USP) educators are faced with transforming learning systems, practices and pedagogy to achieve excellent standards in learning teaching and knowledge creation. Selected case studies are provided to support the discussions for the application and development of OER at USP and the integration of Open Learning Design (OLD) principles and practices. In the drive to enhance the quality of learning and teaching through integrating OER and OLD, research provides the most compelling results for informing practice to achieve effective and sustainable responses to the achievement of the Strategic Plan objectives.

Protecting the Brain: What's the Evidence Behind Strategies to Mitigate Cognitive Aging?

Protecting the Brain: What's the Evidence Behind Strategies to Mitigate Cognitive Aging?

Localism, down-scaling and the strategic dilemmas confronting planning in England

The planning system in England has been subject to dramatic shifts since 2010. The previous government's preference for a strong regional focus in land-use strategy has been substituted with an emphasis on local control and responsibility. This has involved a ‘down-scaling’ of the system, with the revocation of ‘regional spatial strategies’ and a re-emphasis of the primacy of local government plans. It has also brought a ‘localisation’ of plan-making to a neighbourhood scale and a new role for community actors within local development planning. The shift in scale and focus has been accompanied by concerns over the system's ability to achieve broader and longer-term spatial objectives. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior planning officers, this paper reflects on the risks that reform poses to the achievement of strategic planning objectives, looking in particular at housing delivery.

Spectrum: SPE Strategic Plan - Mission Critical

President's column To collect, disseminate, and exchange technical knowledge concerning the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas resources, and related technologies for the public benefit; and to provide opportunities for professionals to enhance their technical and professional competence. In my January column, I talked about the amazing growth of SPE—doubling our membership in the past 10 years. This growth is not only a testament to the evolution of our industry and the high demand for knowledge sharing, but also to SPE’s ability to remain relevant to industry professionals. As we work to remain relevant, we keep our SPE Mission always in the forefront. What does the Board do to sustain that relevance and our focus on mission? For a number of years, we guided the society using a series of Long Range Plans that were pinned to 10-year periods. But when it became evident that the rate of change and the need for responsiveness always outpaced the Long Range Plans—for example, things we thought would take 10 years were accomplished in 5 years—the Board decided we needed an evergreen Strategic Plan. The first Strategic Plan was introduced in 2008. Our Board committees review the Strategic Plan annually to refine the plan, make course corrections, develop tactics and activities for implementing our goals and objectives, and provide guidance to our many standing committees that are responsible for carrying out key programs. Here are some of the initiatives the Board committees have identified for 2012 to support Strategic Plan objectives. The Board Committee on Education and Professional Activities is responsible for the Strategic Plan elements of industry image; resource/reserves definitions, classifications, and guidelines; life-long learning and maintaining competence; and support of academia. Some of the challenges affecting these programs are unequal educational opportunities in different areas of the world, need for a more global and mobile workforce, and inconsistent adoption of new technology. The committee has identified the following objectives for this year: Expand the offering of training courses Expand our energy education efforts Develop best-practice guidelines in key areas Increase the global reach of the Ambassador Lecture Program, in which young professionals provide university students views on E&P careers Further integrate young professionals into SPE

How the Shift to Individualize Supports Gets Stuck and The First Step Out of Gridlock

Many mature and successful service providers continue to find their identity in the heritage of moving people with developmental disabilities out of public institutions. Significant achievements such as providing residential alternatives to large facilities do not immune providers from criticism emerging from a growing demand for individualized supports. The Individualized Supports Think Tank, a group of self-advocates, parents, and service providers convened by the Self-Advocacy Association of New York State (2007) expressed this demand: We define individualized supports as an array of supports, services and resources that are person-centered, based on the unique interests and needs of the person, afford the person as

INTEGRATED APPROACH TO STRATEGIC PLANNING IN PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

Planning of actions for implementation of institution's strategic decisions is one of the most complicated, on the other hand, the weakest in methodic provision complex objectives of strategic planning. Considering the local target of this phase of the strategic planning cycle to set the best ways to take the right directions in development of the scope of activity of an institution, a well‐reasoned composition of such a complex objective is as follows: generating action plan alternatives, defining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives and forming a combination of criteria, analysis and evaluation of the action plan alternatives, adopting a plan. The structure of an action plan for implementing institution's strategic decisions arose the necessity to identify two‐level objectives for drawing up the plan as well as the specific sequence of objective fulfilment in an analysed complex. The specifics of each level was evaluated in our proposals for improvement of the planning of the implementation of institution's strategic decisions based on the analysis of the results of progressive experience.

Case study: planning as learning

Proposes that the objectives of strategic planning may be attained more effectively if implemented via a learning paradigm. In support of this claim, describes a case study detailing implementation of such an initiative plus post-implementation interviews.

Quality Management in the Midst of Chaos: the case for strategic management in the international office

Management of an international relations or international programmes office differs from that of other university offices in that it adds the need to deal with multicultural factors such as differences in language, culture, customs, university structure, procedures, grading systems, legal systems, value systems and non‐verbal means of communication. These factors require the International Relations Manager to have a wide‐based cultural background (which implies extensive reading, travel and work with international partners) as well as enormous diplomatic tact and flexibility. The external pressures on the university's international office are examined and specific strategic planning objectives, as they apply to this office in a European context, are suggested. Quality management techniques are explored. These can be implemented to ensure the smooth and efficient operation of the international office.

Is strategy strategic? impact of total quality management on strategy

Executive Overview As total quality management (TQM) reshapes business practices, it tends to nudge every firm toward a few common strategic planning objectives, namely: continuous improvement in quality of goods and services, responsiveness and flexibility of internal and supplier processes, and waste and cost elimination. A slightly longer set of TQM principles provides guidance helpful in connecting daily activities and decisions with TQM's strategic objectives. While the TQM principles do not fully deal with some complex competitive issues, they do appear to greatly simplify and stabilize much of strategic management. As TQM basics become more influential, senior executives may be drawn away from formulating unique strategies, setting high-level numerical goals, and monitoring performance against the goals. As can be inferred from behaviors of some senior executives of companies winning quality awards, the executive role shifts toward facilitating changes necessary to make TQM everybody's business.

Enrollment management and strategic planning: Resolving a classic tension in higher education

AbstractEnrollment management in higher education is an important tool to operationalize strategic planning. The ever present danger, however, is that short‐term concerns will dominate enrollment management decisions and in turn postpone attainment of strategic planning objectives. This article describes three models of enrollment management and explains how each is supposed to be incorporated into strategic planning. It uses classical growth theory from economics to explicate the dilemma of long‐run and short‐run objectives in conflict and develops an integrated model for strategic planning and enrollment management. Finally, some ways in which this analysis might apply to other nonprofit institutions are suggested.

Generation expansion planning: an expert system approach

An expert system approach to solve the problem of generation expansion planning is presented. The approach is based on the decision tree technique which is used instead of the currently used techniques of mathematical programming. The expert system approach is capable of emulating human expertise in the field of generation planning. New concepts based on the natural properties of the problem are developed to minimise the computation burden by making in the minimum size. The solution technique satisfies the current objectives of strategic planning and is capable of modelling the various uncertainties inherent in the problem of generation expansion planning.

Generation Expansion Planning Using the Decision Tree Technique

This paper presents an efficient technique to solve the problem of generation expansion planning with a reasonable computation burden. The proposed technique is based on the decision tree approach instead of the currently used techniques of mathematical programming. New concepts based on the natural properties of the problem are developed to minimize the computation burden by making the decision tree a minimal size. The solution technique satisfies the current objectives of strategic planning and is capable of modeling the various uncertainties inherent in the problem of generation expansion planning.

Design of a management support system for hospital strategic planning.

Recent changes in the health care industry that foster competition are drastically affecting hospital planning and marketing activities. Increased price competition, the development of less costly alternative health care delivery systems and providers, and the shift to prospective average-cost reimbursement for Medicare beneficiaries are major factors promoting a new emphasis on strategic hospital planning. Hospital information systems do not currently support the sophisticated data-collection and analysis requirements that will be needed to implement strategic planning activities. New data must be collected and old data must be analyzed and stored in new ways. New hospital information systems designs are needed to cope with the change in the economic structure of the health care industry and its effects on hospital information needs. This paper proposes a system design for a management support system that will assist hospital administrators and planners in analyzing internal organizational data and external industry data to develop strategic planning objectives, strategies, and business plans. Analysis of the structure and process of hospital strategic planning was performed to identify the information needs of hospital planners. A prototype system is currently being implemented at the University of Arizona. The system provides an integrating framework for data base management systems, executive information systems, model management systems, and dialogue management systems. Objective analytical models and subjective strategic planning models are available to assist with idea structuring and decision processing.