Collaboration, Team & Project Management
Faculty and staff morale is critical to the success of an institution. Collaboration and inclusion in decision making are a critical component of this. Nearly all of the major ventures I have initiated have therefore been collaborative in nature. As a manager I believe my primary job is to coordinate and integrate the activities of my direct reports, guide and mentor them, and partner with them for success. I therefore have a very collaborative management style. I try where possible to lead by asking questions and guiding my reports so they can develop their own solutions to problems. I illustrate examples of this type of collaboration with the following examples.
One of the most important roles of a Provost is to determine how faculty lines are allocated to the colleges and departments. At Radford, in partnership with my deans, I developed a risk and growth rate based model that is based on key metrics from each department to determine allocation of new lines and shifting of lines from declining or phased out programs. At FHSU, the deans and I developed a process for new program planning and prioritization. It is based on Dept. of Labor projections for employment, salary trends, projected enrollments and graduates, existing and needed expertise within the faculty, success of the program at peer institutions and a number of other factors. Each dean presents and defends each new program proposal to the other deans who then rank the program. These rankings then determine the implementation priority.
As the Middle States Liaison for Mercy I was responsible for the institutional re-accreditation process. This was an enormous collaborative cross-institutional project involving hundreds of participants. It involved assembling self-study committees composed of faculty and staff across the institution and guiding their process, managing multiple focus groups for students and adjunct faculty, and building understanding of the accreditation process across the institution with briefings at major college events. I managed the overall process including the agenda and scheduling of the executive and steering committees and coordination of the self-study writing team.
Development of the online School of Pharmacy at Creighton required multiple academic departments and support organizations to cooperate. Similarly, multi-campus course sharing required agreements between the upper administration and departments at many of the Penn State campuses.
While at Stony Brook I worked closely with the Dean of the Libraries to convert space freed up by digital access to resources and weeding of collections. This collaboration resulted in Collaborative Learning Areas which provided technology enabled group workspaces, presentation practice areas, and other team spaces that are extremely popular with the students.
Project Management
I am a proficient user of the Microsoft's project management software and have found that in-depth task planning and sequencing, the use of Gantt charts, task dependencies, and resource management to be a very effective approach. For example, the final stage of my strategic planning process involves working with my managers to develop project plans for operationalization - I have attached a sample of this below.
