Working group for enhanced planning tools formed on campus

Recommendations will be presented to the campus Integrated Planning Committee this spring.

In a post-secondary environment where enhancing the quality of academic programs is critical, it is more important than ever to align the university’s resources with its priorities. A working group has been struck to research and recommend enhanced planning tools that will support UVic decision-makers in academic and service units in reaching that goal.

Chaired by Associate Vice-President Academic Planning Katy Mateer, the group’s task is to recommend criteria and an institutional data set that will assist administrators in annual planning processes.

“During the president’s Campus Conversations process last fall, faculty and staff expressed a desire for a more transparent, data-driven process to provide them with the tools to facilitate planning and better align resources with university priorities,” says Mateer.

The working group’s activities represent phase one of Enhanced Planning: Making Choices, an institutional planning initiative—led by Vice-President Academic and Provost Reeta Tremblay—that will help academic and administrative units ensure their resource allocations align with university priorities. The working group is supported by an advisory committee that includes members of the Senate committees on university planning and budget, plus faculty, student and staff representatives.

Unlike some other Canadian institutions, including the University of Guelph and the University of Saskatchewan, UVic is not employing the program ranking and prioritization process advocated by Dr. Robert Dickeson. Instead, the university is looking to create a UVic approach—straightforward, user-friendly and easily accessible tools that units can employ within their existing planning processes.  

“The long-term goal of these planning processes is to ensure UVic can maintain the quality of its programs and services—in education, research and community engagement —in our current financially constrained environment,” says Mateer. “We want to develop a set of enhanced tools that will allow decision-makers to assess the quality, resource requirements and contribution of programs and activities in support of the university’s institutional priorities. The criteria and data need to be reliable, valid and evidence-based, so they can be consistently applied across campus.”

Over the next few months, the working group will be consulting with members of the university community to help it recommend criteria and data sets that will assist current planning processes. The group will also review the kinds of information being developed and used by comparable universities.

The working group’s recommendations will be presented to the Integrated Planning Committee (IPC) later this spring, with some of the information targeted to be available to assist university units beginning in fall 2014.

The IPC, led by Tremblay, includes UVic’s vice-presidents and associate vice-presidents, sets annual institutional planning priorities to ensure resource allocation across the university is consistent with the objectives of the strategic plan.

Phase 2 of the Enhanced Planning: Making Choices process will take place at the faculty and unit levels once the working group has finished its work. Deans, managers and VPs will use the information and data gathered by the working group to make planning choices within each department and portfolio.

More info: bit.ly/uvic-plan