VC's open staff forum: 14 June 2017
The Vice-Chancellor's annual Year Ahead Address and his termly open staff forums have provided opportunities to update staff on the latest strategy developments.
During each event the Vice-Chancellor gives a presentation and then invites questions from the audience.
Questions about our strategy
Previous strategy documents suffered from lack of detail on implementation and lack of clarity on how targets were to be achieved. You have mentioned that the upcoming new strategy will intentionally lack such details and will instead be a vision statement. Why not call it then a vision instead a strategy and develop a separate strategy document which embeds an implementation plan? Or how else are you going to ensure that the University is able to achieve the new targets and people know their role in the delivery?
The process this year has been to develop a strategic framework which will help to guide the University over the next decade. This will be complemented by detailed strategies for Research, Education, Engagement and Sustainability and each School and Professional Service will need to ensure that their strategies interdigitate with these.
The next few years will probably be amongst the most challenging that universities have faced for decades and the key thing that the strategic framework will do is to ensure that we have a shared vision for getting through these complex times.
We will also agree a small set of key indicators with Council that will allow us to understand how well we are doing against our vision.
The University has decided to seek accreditations - EQUIS and AACSB; to what extent was the decision to pursue either of these preceded (as it should have been done) with a strategic needs discussion?
EQUIS and AACSB are the internationally accepted accreditations for leading business schools and they provide prospective students with an additional guarantee of reliable standards in teaching, research and other activities. BMEc has made great strides since its establishment just a few years ago, and EQUIS and AACSB accreditation would reinforce the School’s position as a market leader globally in business education. I appreciate the huge amount of hard work that goes into making these submissions and I’m very happy to talk more with the teams involved.