Every organisation needs to understand where it’s coming from and where it’s going.
Universities operate in a complex environment with many, often conflicting, drivers of strategy and even more stakeholders.
In this context, being clear about what you want to achieve is important. So is thinking about how you’re going to get there. Aside from planning, that also means understanding your context, how it may develop in the future and how you will navigate those changes.
SUMS’ structured yet flexible and tailored approach allows you to develop clear, holistic and future-informed strategies for your whole institution or any of its parts. We’ll work with you to engage your community and build buy-in as you go.
Our strategy development model helps you develop clarity of vision grounded in what really matters to you and your community. Then you can set a strategic direction which is ambitious and deliverable in unpredictable times.
We work with you to create your strategy through five stages:
Each of these can be tailored, expanded or accelerated to ensure that the strategy process is right for your institution, your division or your faculty.
We’ll partner with you to use quantitative data and qualitative insights in your decision-making about your strategy development. We’ll support you to look inside and outside of your organisation to ground your ambitions in the realities, constraints and opportunities of your external environment and your internal development.
And we’ll work with you to create space for bottom-up ideas and insights from your community, distilling and integrating these with top-down requirements. This engagement with your staff, students and other stakeholders brings out innovation and builds shared purpose.
SUMS is your partner to cut through the complexity. We help you move from data to the analysis that allows you to make evidence-based decisions; we support you to structure engagement, sensing and feedback to make sure that your vision and strategy truly speak in your institution’s voice.
We’ll also help you to back up your goals with nuts-and-bolts modelling and testing, giving you confidence that your resources and capabilities will support successful delivery of your strategy.
Combining institution-wide engagement with horizon-scanning, analysis and back-end financial modelling, we helped the University to develop a strategy which is both ambitious and deliverable, with clear voice and purpose around its goals.
We supported Trinity Hall to develop a strategic purpose framework to guide the College’s decision-making over the coming decade, through structured visioning and close engagement with the college’s community.
