Case Study: Strategic planning to meet evolving public health challenges
Strategic planning provides a proactive roadmap for institutions to strengthen their operations, elevate the student experience, and position themselves for long-term success.
Vaden Higher Education Consulting supported a newly appointed director in clarifying his vision for a research center within a private university’s School of Public Health and developing a strategic plan to position it to meet today’s emerging needs.
Challenge
The director stepped into the role with limited institutional context and a lean support team. Early in his tenure, he was called upon to help articulate a new vision and set a clear path forward in a fast-moving public health space.
Objective
To guide the research center through a collaborative and structured process that would match the new director's vision with a clear and actionable strategic plan.
Solution
Effective strategic plans create clear alignment between priorities, actions, and the audiences they aim to serve. In the first phase, Vaden Consulting established a clear framework for the planning process and built in opportunities to engage key internal and external stakeholders at each stage of the process.
Given limited staffing, we partnered with a subject matter expert to help develop plan content and shape measurable, time-bound objectives and results. These were then vetted and refined through iterative feedback from scientific and university leaders.
The final deliverable was a comprehensive, three-year strategic plan, as well as supporting messaging and presentation materials for stakeholder engagement, along with project management tools to help the growing research center stay focused and on task in achieving its goals in real time.
Results
This strategic planning framework became the operational backbone for the center director to activate his team and stay aligned with his mission-critical goals.
As of result of our work together, the center was able to:
Establish a new, expanded focus for the research center
Publish their full, three-year strategic plan on the center’s website
Build a supporting team with specific expertise to lead the center's next phase
Stay on task in reaching critical and time-bound milestones
“Jennifer went above and beyond – her attention to detail and commitment kept us on track and made a tremendous difference in bringing our strategic re-envisioning initiative to life.”