Making Change document opens door to making choices
BY MARY DICKIESON
How should the University of Guelph develop over the next several years to serve its core mission? Who and what do we need to get there? And how will we pay for it?
We should answer those questions as a University community, says provost and vice-president (academic) Maureen Mancuso. She's leading the effort to establish an integrated planning process at U of G that would blend University-wide and unit-specific planning efforts and synchronize them with the budgeting process.
“Our goals are to work within a multi-year time frame and systematize our planning efforts into a well-defined, repeatable procedure that ensures a match between budgets and objectives, between administrative structures and the academic enterprise, between accountability and results,” she says. “Integrated planning is a way to further enhance the ability of the University to confront and control its future.”
Mancuso notes that the Rae report recommends that universities be required to submit multi-year plans to the government. “If we pursue integrated planning, we would be in a position to meet this multi-year requirement,” she says.
There's no denying that U of G owes its current status as one of the country's top comprehensive universities to good academic and administrative planning. Mancuso says a good example of this success is the strategic multi-year effort mounted to respond to the double cohort — an effort by the whole University that has drawn praise both from within and outside the university sector.
“But we can't rest on our laurels,” she says, and points to current issues such as the Ontario government's tuition freeze and its possible withdrawal from matching infrastructure programs as issues that may prove just as challenging as the double cohort. U of G must prepare for both the predictable trends and uncertain commitments that lie ahead to increase flexibility and reduce vulnerability, she says.
Last fall, president Alastair Summerlee presented a brief to the Senate Committee on University Planning that documented the need for U of G to move from “making change” to “making choices.” He described a framework for planning that is consistent with the University's accepted values and strategic directions and guided by the realities of our competitive society, anticipated enrolment, financial pressures and physical limitations.
In a second paper, Mancuso described the advantages of adopting an integrated planning model and outlined the critical steps necessary to build on current U of G planning exercises to develop a five-year plan for the fiscal years 2006/07 to 2010/11.
These first two documents will be posted on the University's planning website in mid-February. They will be followed by more detailed briefs to outline short-term budget plans and interim academic priorities required to cover the transition period from the current fiscal year to May 2006.
Like many publicly funded institutions, Guelph has focused its budget cycle around the provincial operating grant, says Mancuso. That process began to unravel when the timing of the provincial budget or announcements about financial constraints began to vary. In fact, there are many elements of the current budget that already take a longer-term perspective, such as carry forwards that assist units in multi-year planning and cash-flow initiatives spread over several years.
She says adopting a multi-year time frame would expand current strategies that work well, while ensuring that financial decisions are made in concert with academic and research planning instead of following them, as often happens now.
“By tackling the planning and budgeting in concert, we will better position ourselves to be able to make choices and take advantage of opportunities instead of being forced to react to government actions.”
Mancuso suggests that primary responsibility for producing the integrated plan would rest with the current Planning Steering Committee, which consists of the president, vice-presidents and representatives of faculty, staff and students. The planning process, however, would begin in each individual academic and administrative unit, where deans and directors would guide the process of planning and consultation.
“Integrated planning is based on collegiality and openness to the planning and budgeting enterprise,” she says. “We start with discussions about what we want to do, submit those aspirations to rigorous analysis, then decide how we're going to resource our plans.”
She notes that the detail required for integrated planning is essentially a superset of that needed for a number of similar purposes, such as undergraduate and graduate program reviews, external accreditation and other forms of assessment. Documentation already in place for these assessments will guide the new integrated planning process, she says.
As with most planning exercises, the process can be just as valuable as the final plan, says Mancuso. U of G has been well-served by research, discussion and evaluation in the 1990s that identified learner-centredness, research intensity, collaboration, open learning and internationalism as the University's strategic directions.
She says the adoption of an integrated planning model would provide ongoing renewal of Guelph's commitment to those priorities, help clarify objectives and give U of G better tools to evaluate its progress.
Mancuso acknowledges that academic, research and operational units will all be faced with difficult choices in the short term while the integrated planning process proceeds toward 2006. But she points to current fiscal realities as a good argument for the implementation of a multi-year plan that would make it easier to focus resources and/or personnel on critical strategic areas and initiatives.
For the longer term, she plans to work with deans and department heads to review academic priorities and establish realistic plans that will enable the University to take advantage of any future reinvestment in post-secondary education that may result from the recommendations of the Bob Rae advisory panel.
