Strategic planning in higher education is the process an institution follows to realize its vision of its ideal future state. The vision becomes a reality through the process that defines specific goals, needs, and actions and it helps to structure and contextualize information leading to important decisions.
An effective planning process starts with a thorough understanding of the institutional current situation through consultation with internal and external stakeholders in a bottom-up approach. The 8 HEIs from Kurdistan region of Iraq have thus collected feedbacks from every stakeholder group:
- Students
- Alumni members
- Faculty members & campus community
- Community groups
- Senior administrators
- External partnerships
The strategic plan includes a clear and unique vision statement as well as its institutional values.
By clarifying the obstacles and identifying strengths and weakness, through a SWOT analysis, the Kurdish HEIs had the occasion prioritize their strategic goals and develop focused efforts to achieve them. Finally, they were able to migrate from goal-setting to action-planning with projects by describing how to accomplish the institutional objectives and by setting some key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive and measure performance against set targets.
The ultimate goal of this task was to develop an institutional strategic plan with the involved stakeholders for each Kurdish university, validated by the leadership of each university and by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in KRG. The plan includes the university strategy on Quality Assurance, recognition of credits, Bologna Process and in general on management of the governance system, which are the pillars of the APPRAIS project.
All the strategic plans of the 8 HEIs in KRG are based on the Roadmap defined in WP2 and on the shared Strategy of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in KRG.
To facilitate the strategic planning process, some templates and supporting docs were developed:
- Strategic Plan Template
- SWOT analysis Template
- SWOT analysis guidelines
- Strategic Plan Tips & Suggestions
The public versions of the Institutional Strategic Plans are available HERE, together with the Ministerial strategy.
To find the complete Institutional Strategic Plans signed by the University Presidents and the signed Ministerial strategy, please consult this page.
