Case Studies
First Impressions College in The NPO Version.
First Impressions College was founded in 1889 as a specialist institution to train students for employment in the printing and graphic arts industries. The college prospered for the next 100 years but recently government funding has declined and, for the first time in living memory, enrolments have actually fallen. Stan Gutenberg, the current Director, decided to develop a new strategic plan. Stan asked the heads of each of the four main teaching departments, as well as the college business manager, to join him to form a planning team, using the methodology of The Argenti System. They invited Catherine Dwight, an organizational psychologist they had used previously in various roles, to act as an external Planning Facilitator.
The first question in Argenti for all planning teams is "what is your organization trying to do for whom?". This took the planning team rather by surprise and they were unsure whether the intended beneficiaries were their students or the printing companies who, after all, largely funded the college and recruited their graduates. Finally they decided that "the purpose of the college is to provide practical vocational printing industry-relevant education to post-school students".
The next Argenti question is; "how should you measure this?". The obvious, down-to-earth answer was what the students themselves often told the college – how quickly students got jobs in the printing industries and how much this college had enhanced their earnings prospects, or words to that effect. Unfortunately the college had no such figures. The college Bursar said it would take years to obtain them. It was decided to start collecting these but meanwhile to fall back on the only figures they did have, namely the opinion of students leaving the college. This statistic – Graduate Advocate Score or GAS – had been collected for many years and measured the balance of leavers who would, and would not, recommend their friends to go to this college. Other, less relevant, statistics were also available including the opinion of the ex-students" employers (Employer Satisfaction or ES). Fortunately nationwide figures for these statistics were also available as a comparison. While the national figures for GAS and for ES had slowly risen over the past 5 years the figures for First Impressions had fallen – rapidly for GAS (from +21 to +2) and obviously heading towards a negative figure very shortly. That would imply that the balance of leavers would then not recommend the college.
Stan"s planning team saw quite plainly that the top strategic priority was to reverse the decline as soon as possible and they set targets for GAS for the next five years to indicate (a) the required minimum acceptable improvement and (b) a satisfactory level of performance. It is one thing to set a target and quite another to hit it, however, and when the team made the "No Change in Strategy" forecast which The Argenti System also demands in Stage 2, they were horrified to see that, without some tough action, these targets were not going to be hit either in the short term or the long.
The team invited a number of middle rank teachers and administrators to the "SWOT Workshop". Following The Argenti System directions for this event very carefully, Catherine Dwight, the outside facilitator, steered the meeting delicately through the agenda – "delicately" because she had been warned of a rift between the older, traditional teachers and the younger, more recently qualified ones. Gradually the key SWOTs were teased out – one of which was, of course, this rift – and a small number of other strategically significant items also emerged with great clarity (these are the "strategic elephants" which are given such prominence in The Argenti System). One of these was, as everyone knew, that the teaching facilities were outdated because finance had not been available. Although the list of Weaknesses was as long as had been expected there were a surprising number of both Strengths and Opportunities. The meeting, which had at times been fraught, ended with a perceptible rise in morale.
The planning team had to meet several times to thrash out a set of practical strategies. These included making greater use of the fact that the college was sited in a conurbation and local demand had been underestimated in the past; a little effort would yield a large number of potential students. Also the formation of partnerships with local printing firms, in which the college provided premises (in their extensive campus buildings) while the printers provided practical training for the students. These new incomes would fund the modernization of teaching facilities and the recruitment of new younger staff. These, and other changes, were calculated to come close to hitting the targets for GAS over the following years.
These plans were approved by the governing board and finally, in Stage 5, the planning team drew up a set of Action Plans and a Monitoring Plan. Most organizations today have a budgetary system which alerts the management to variances in their financial figures. But this is a backward-looking procedure which tells managers when something has already gone wrong. In The Argenti monitoring system the planning team has a list of trends and events which underpin the selected strategies. By looking ahead the team can see if any of these listed trends are not going to happen as forecast; that would give advanced warning that their strategies required modification.