Let’s set the stage. You’re a sharp, focused higher education leader staring down the realities of expanding your online and hybrid learning programs. You’ve got big goals: running your online operations in-house, owning the process, and driving growth on your terms.
This is where Online Growth Enablement comes in. This isn’t a fancy buzzword. It’s the real work behind sustainable change. It’s the boots-on-the-ground understanding of exactly where you are today so you can figure out how to move forward tomorrow.
At Archer, we do this every day — rolling up our sleeves and digging deep to map out the real picture of an institution’s online learning infrastructure. Because, let’s be honest. The only way to grow is to start with the truth about your current state and your place within the landscape of the communities you serve with your programs.
Why Your Current State Matters
Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum — especially not in online learning. Enabling the growth of your online learning infrastructure takes coordination, collaboration, and a whole lot of buy-in from every corner of your university. Marketing, tech, enrollment, financial aid, the registrar, faculty, leadership — if they’re not on the same page as you, you can’t successfully move forward. Period.
Driving real growth starts with taking an unflinching look at where you stand today. Questions you should be asking about your online operations include:
Where are you strong?
Where are you struggling?
Where are the untapped opportunities you can scale?
This isn’t about a vague, feel-good assessment from 50,000 feet up. It’s about getting into the weeds. Because, until you understand the inner workings of your current infrastructure, you’re not going to build anything sustainable. You’ll just be putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling foundation. And that’s not going to cut it in the long run.
The Power of Deep Insights
Let’s take a look at a real-world example of why a close examination of your current online learning infrastructure matters. One of our partner universities was taking 14 days to review and process the transcripts of students applying to their online programs. This might work fine for a traditional on-campus program with two or three big start dates a year, but for an online program, the game changes. To stay competitive, you need five or six start dates annually. And that 14-day turnaround? For our partner, it meant missing out on dozens of potential enrollments.
Fixing this issue wasn’t about throwing money at the problem. It was about setting a clear benchmark and making it happen. We worked with the institution to rethink its processes, reassign its teams’ responsibilities, and streamline every single step of its transcript review.
The effectiveness of every touchpoint you have with a potential student and every handoff between your admissions, financial aid, and academic advising teams affects your ability to deliver an overall positive student experience. Deep operational insights aren’t just nice to have; they’re the key to uncovering bottlenecks so you can clear the way for real, measurable growth.
How We Help: The Growth Enablement Assessment
At Archer, we don’t do guesswork. We help our partners make sense of the current state of their online learning infrastructure through our Growth Enablement Assessment — a no-stone-left-unturned look at every department and operational variable. From enrollment workflows to marketing execution, we get into the details that others overlook to help you figure out where you are and make a plan for where you want to be.
Our approach is anchored in our Good, Better, Best methodology:
Good: Your processes are functional. They get the job done, but let’s be honest — they need improvement to keep pace in a competitive online marketplace.
Better: There’s progress. Your processes are showing alignment, but they’re not quite optimized yet.
Best: This is where you want to be. Your processes are efficient, scalable, and fully aligned with your strategic goals.
This isn’t just an audit. It’s a road map. By pinpointing exactly where you stand and where you need to go, we equip you with the insights and strategies to move your online learning operations from functional to thriving.
Why It’s All Worth It
Yes, this takes time. Yes, it’s hard work. But the payoff is undeniable.
Fully understanding the current state of your online learning infrastructure isn’t just a box to check — it’s the foundation for every initiative that follows. It gives you the clarity to enhance not only your online learning programs but also the overall health and effectiveness of your institution.
When you commit to this process, you’re building something bigger than just operational efficiency. You’re creating alignment across departments, fostering innovation, and embedding collaboration and continuous improvement into your institution’s culture. When every team is in sync, bottlenecks disappear, every touchpoint matters, and your processes deliver on the promise of a strong student experience.
It’s not just worth it. It’s transformative. If you’re ready to take the first step toward long-term success and scalability, contact Archer Education. Let’s build the online learning infrastructure your institution deserves, together.
John Goodwin is Archer Education’s EVP of Online Growth Enablement. Archer revolutionizes the student experience by supporting partners through change, helping institutions achieve sustainable growth while fostering self-sufficiency.
Applying a Strategic Framework to Your Organizational Plan
“It’s Groundhog Day … again,” said Phil Connors, a disgruntled weatherman.
In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Phil Connors knew what it was like to experience life as an endless series of tedious events that recur in the same way day after day. And many of us working in online education management — especially in a highly competitive environment — can begin to feel like Phil did.
Receive enrollment targets. Develop and launch annual marketing campaigns. Pursue prospective students. Track students’ applications to completion. Onboard students. Repeat.
But when do you have time to reflect and analyze? When do you pause long enough to identify areas in need of improvement? How do you plan for innovation, growth, or testing when all of your time is spent on the status quo?
In my recent article on building online student services, we discussed the importance of assessing your organizational design and effectiveness to identify improvement opportunities and facilitate high-quality growth. My latest article on the organizational development journey took the discussion a step further to describe the steps involved in developing a multiyear approach to stakeholder engagement around strategic initiatives.
With this article, we address the concept of escape velocity. We’ll show you how a multiyear strategic growth road map can help your organization break free from its Groundhog Day cycle and launch it into tomorrow.
Why a Multiyear Strategic Road Map Matters
In higher education, we’re accustomed to having a university-level strategic plan with broad themes and objectives. These plans are useful in that they allow academic and service units to identify areas of contribution or special projects.
Less common, however, is a performance road map for the unit-level organization itself. Specific programs and functions may have goals, targets, or expected outcomes, but do they collectively add up to something more than the sum of parts? Are teams competing against one another for resources or prospects? Have the true bottlenecks in processes and infrastructure been identified so that teams can tackle them together, or are they each working on problems in a silo?
A multiyear strategic road map aligns the work you and your colleagues are doing today with the work to be done next year — and the year after that — to reach new levels of achievement, performance, and value. This means moving beyond “keeping the lights on” to building a true organizational vision where day-to-day tasks and operations contribute to a larger mission.
The multiyear road map also works to keep everyone accountable, so that the organization can escape the gravitational pull of mere survival, instead moving up through the atmosphere into new spaces and opportunities.
Importantly, the road map is not developed by a small group of people and then handed down from organizational leadership. It requires a strategic conversation across the organization that identifies what winning looks like and how all parties will win together.
Introducing the Hoshin Kanri Strategic Framework
A simple search for “strategic framework” in your browser or artificial intelligence tool will bring up 25 to 50 options, which can feel overwhelming. As you dig into the variety of frameworks, you realize that each has a specific purpose and most are not interchangeable. For example, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis can be used to understand your organization’s general position in the current environment, while the Ansoff matrix can help you dive into your individual products and their specific markets.
In our opinion, if you want to develop an organization-wide multiyear strategic road map, the Hoshin Kanri framework is a powerful tool.
The Hoshin Kanri framework originated in Japan after World War II and was historically used in the manufacturing and technology industries (think Toyota). However, the framework can apply to any industry including higher education. The words “hoshin” and “kanri” mean direction and administration, which in this context refers to identifying the most important strategic focus areas for the next three to five years, and then managing activities and delivering against annual objectives in those focus areas.
To fully engage with the framework, there are seven steps that move from vision development to planning and execution to bidirectional feedback management, which makes this framework different from those that only focus on one of those aspects.
At its core, the framework is an iterative blueprint for escape velocity — where everyone’s contributions align and where individuals are responsible for providing direct, productive, and sometimes even uncomfortable feedback about progress, barriers, and how the plans are working. This feedback loop is one of the most powerful parts of the model for organization-wide deep listening and trust-building.
In the next section, we will discuss each part of the framework.
Breaking Down the Hoshin Kanri Model Components
As we walk through the components of the Hoshin Kanri model, remember that models and frameworks are suggestions or guidelines on how to organize a strategy, not directives. Every organization is different, and you should feel free to make the model your own.
Step 1: Establish (or Revisit and Refine) Your Organizational Vision
A multiyear road map, by definition, requires a vision for where your organization could or should be three to five years from now. While it’s easy to understand what you want your organization to “escape” from in terms of the status quo, it’s more work to determine the opportunity space, the direction of progress, and the velocity at which the organization should move there.
This is often the point where organizations need external support: fresh eyes to assess the market opportunities and the organizational development opportunities (e.g., a good, better, best model). Once the organizational vision is defined, communication and socialization of that vision to every individual in the organization is critical for feedback, engagement, and buy-in.
Step 2: Establish Strategic Focus Areas (aka Stretch Goals)
Here’s where your organization places its bets. What are the three to five focus areas that define how your organization will escape the status quo and strategically move into a new level of opportunity, performance, or achievement?
Think big swings that are a stretch but still possible. Think about what would get individuals in your organization excited about the work.
Remember, these strategic focus areas flow from the organizational vision. Some of the areas will be quantitative in nature (e.g., grow enrollments by 20% year over year; improve satisfaction scores by 40%), and some may be more qualitative (e.g., develop an organizational decision-making framework and process). All areas should be measurable.
Step 3: Break Strategic Areas of Focus Into Annual Objectives
In this stage of the process, your organization works backward from those strategic focus areas to plot the annual steps of achievement and progress. These objectives are established at the organizational level.
Step 4: Cascade Annual Objectives Into Programmatic and Functional Objectives
In this stage, program and function leaders develop their annual objectives based on the annual organizational-level objectives and begin to determine the key performance indicators for their teams.
This is also the step where the organization agrees upon an objective-level primary plan owner. Which individual is accountable for progress against the objective, for escalations when progress is impeded, and for communication of wins? Does that individual agree that the resource base to support the objective is sufficient?
Step 5: Execute
In this implementation stage, plans are deployed and progress is measured.
Steps 6 and 7: Conduct Monthly and Annual Reviews
The Hoshin Kanri model builds in regular strategic road map and annual plan feedback loops to ensure bidirectional feedback and iteration are employed where needed.
The frequency of your periodic reviews within an annual cycle may depend on the size and structure of your organization. The model suggests monthly plan reviews. But for some organizations, monthly reviews are too frequent and quarterly reviews are preferred. For other organizations, such as start-ups, monthly reviews are not frequent enough and biweekly sprint-level reviews may be needed.
The core idea is to ensure that those who are implementing against annual plans have the opportunity to discuss progress, blockers, resource concerns, and more so that leadership can determine if adjustments to the plans are necessary.
The annual review is the time to consider progress against the multiyear vision. Is the organization on target? Does the team need to be even more ambitious given evolving market conditions, the competitive landscape, or technological advances? Does the organization need to adjust its resource planning or design to support progress?
Organizational Strategic Road Map: An At-a-Glance View
As you can see from the seven steps detailed above, the Hoshin Kanri model is basically a series of embedded to-do lists with metrics and owners attached to them. The plan can be created in a document that displays the action items in a sequential order with as many words as it takes to describe the holistic plan. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the organization can access, understand, and execute against the plan.
However, there is a way to develop a visual tool — without fancy applications or systems — that summarizes the entirety of the plan so that everyone can see themselves aligned with both the long-term and immediate objectives. This method is called the X-matrix. It works well with a spreadsheet tool, for example. In our graphic example below, we’ve replaced the “X” with a compass visual, but an X works just as well.
Within a box in your spreadsheet, create your “X” by inserting crossed lines. This creates four quadrants. In Hoshin Kanri, these quadrants are classified with compass directions: north, south, east, and west (hence our graphical treatment).
An organization starts with the south quadrant (or bottom of the X). This is where you list the three to five strategic areas of focus. Each area of focus has its own row. In our graphic, these are the bottom three rows in the light blue, orange, and dark blue colors.
In the west quadrant, you can list the high-level annual objectives for the year. Use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the strategic area of focus (on the bottom) matches the individual high-level annual objective (shown here as columns to the left that correspond in color).
Then, move to the north quadrant. This is where you list the business-level objectives that flow from the annual objectives. What are the specific tasks for each program and function? You can use the spreadsheet rows to enter an “x” where the business-level objective aligns with the high-level annual objective. In our example here, all three business-level objectives in the top rows correspond to the strategic focus area and the high-level annual objective color-coded in light blue.
Keep the east quadrant blank for a moment. This is where key targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) will go, and again, once you complete these, you can use the spreadsheet model to put an “x” where the target aligns with the individual business-level objective. In our version, we’ve used slightly different shades of light blue to show which KPIs go with which business-level objectives.
Go to the Resources section of the spreadsheet. Here you can document the accountable owner of the business-level objective, and use the spreadsheet rows to note with an “x” which owner is aligned with the particular initiative. You can use primary and secondary owners or just stick with primary owners, depending on your organization’s size and structure. These owners can then finalize the east quadrant with the specific KPIs in coordination with organizational leadership.
Depending on your organization’s size and structure, you can develop one master-level version of this multiyear plan, or you can develop one per program or function for ease of use. If spreadsheets are not of interest, there are online applications and services (some are free; some are fee-based) that serve as an interactive platform on which you and your teams can manage the development and tracking of objectives and progress.
Build Your Multiyear Growth Road Map
Engineering your escape velocity from Groundhog Day to the future takes introspection, time, iteration, and communication in all directions. Strategic tools and frameworks, like Hoshin Kanri, are not always necessary, but they can help your teams organize against a vision with plans, processes, and performance conversations.
No matter the tool, framework, or steps you take, the payoff of using introspection and planning to achieve your multiyear targets is escape velocity from the tethers of winter doldrums into a spring of new growth.
The strategy and development team at Archer Education can help you develop and achieve your multiyear strategic road map goals. Contact us today.
Next Steps to Empower Your Multiyear Growth Road Map
In higher education organizations, enrollment management plans can be like the weather: short term, ever changing, and subject to the whims of the seasons each year.
But for your organization and programs to thrive no matter the conditions, a multiyear growth road map is needed to keep all parts of the organization aligned and moving toward a strategic set of goals.
In my last article, I discussed the importance of taking a step back to assess the people, processes, and technology of your organization to identify opportunities for improvement and high-quality growth. This critical first step results in an organizational development plan that moves your institution from good, to better, to best in class.
With this article, we’ll dig deeper to outline how you can build a multiyear growth road map that allows you to weather everything from regulatory storm clouds to enrollment droughts, keeping your focus on a longer-term strategy. You’ll learn how to get started, measure your progress, and ensure that feedback loops are in place for continuous improvement.
A multiyear growth road map helps your teams move beyond term-to-term thinking to develop activities that ladder up and contribute to a true organizational vision. Everyone has a part to play that is specific, measured, and celebrated.
The First 90 Days
As with any effective plan, laying a strong foundation can lead to long-term success. In the context of your multiyear strategic road map, building the foundation involves these steps:
Hold discovery sessions: Engage with individuals and teams across your organization and open up space for productive — and sometimes uncomfortable — conversations. You are looking for concerns, challenges, and hopes for the future. This phase isn’t about problem-solving. It’s about understanding the existing culture and building trust.
Complete an internal readiness assessment: This critical component looks at your institution’s existing strengths, weaknesses, and roadblocks. The readiness assessment process ensures that any proposed changes are offered within the context of your institution’s culture and helps you paint a realistic picture of what you’re ready to take on.
Conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis: Once you have identified your internal current state, you can then compare that to the broader market and competitive landscape. Where is your organization or portfolio strongest, and where is it at greatest risk? Where are the potential market opportunities that you can begin to assess? Where are the most likely threats from competitors, regulation, resource shifts, or other market trends?
Prepare for action: As the first 90 days close, you’ll have developed a much clearer image of a business case and action plan. This could mean starting with centralizing marketing efforts, for example, or it may involve planning for a technology tool or system and data mapping for eventual migration. Each institution is different.
Year One: The Blueprint
With a solid understanding of your institution’s current landscape — both internally and externally — it’s time to launch into the first year of your strategic road map. These 365 days are about implementing basic changes to boot up the structures, systems, and processes that will support growth in later years.
Build your blueprint: Your blueprint is your North Star for change. It’s a clear vision that outlines your key goals, timelines, and measures of success. Think of it as a collection of SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Take simple steps: This is where you implement the first round of changes, which should be relatively achievable. This could be adopting a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, refining a marketing strategy, or establishing new faculty support systems. The goal here is to get the basics right, then let these efforts evolve over time.
Gather feedback: This may be the most important part of your first-year efforts: garnering input on the efficacy of the changes made from stakeholders from all levels and departments at your institution. Feedback loops help you gauge your progress and identify areas that need adjustments.
Year Two: Optimize and Accelerate
With a firm foundation now in place from your first year’s efforts, the focus shifts toward refinement, optimization, and acceleration of your growth initiatives. This phase is crucial, as it’s where you begin to see the fruits of your labor blossom.
Double down on success: Now is the perfect time to capitalize on what’s working. Your teams are eager for a win, so identify any initiative that has shown promise — be it a marketing strategy that’s driving higher engagement or an educational program that’s exceeded enrollment expectations. By scaling these successful ventures, you can ride the momentum and amplify your results.
Refine with data: Use the data accumulated from the initial implementations to tweak and improve your systems and processes. Engage in conversations with your teams to pinpoint any bottlenecks or slowdowns in the student journey. Experiment with new approaches based on these insights, and critically evaluate the impact of these changes. This iterative process is key to continuous improvement.
Celebrate and share visible wins: Success is a powerful motivator. Make it a point to regularly share and celebrate each tangible achievement — whether it’s a surge in student enrollments, heightened faculty engagement, or the seamless adoption of a new process. Publicizing these wins not only builds internal momentum but also reinforces the collective commitment to your strategic goals.
Years Three and Four: Knowledge Sharing and Independence
As your strategic initiatives mature, the focus will naturally transition toward sharing knowledge and strengthening your internal teams. This critical period in years three and four is about empowering your staff and shifting your role from hands-on implementer to guiding coach.
Empower through ownership: Encourage teams to take full ownership of the implemented processes and changes. This allows you to step back and adopt a coaching role, guiding your teams through challenges and ensuring they have the confidence and skills needed to manage and refine these new systems independently. This is also the time to ensure your organization has strong documentation on its processes and training both for knowledge sharing and to support future hiring and onboarding.
Build internal capacity: Looking ahead and preparing for a future where your organization can operate and evolve without the need for external partnerships is essential. This requires a dedicated effort and a commitment to providing ongoing training, resources, and support to build a robust internal capacity. Invest in these areas to develop a self-sustaining system that thrives on its own merits.
Celebrate the milestones: After your extensive efforts over the past few years, taking the time to celebrate is not just rewarding but necessary. Highlight the significant impacts made by your teams, and take a moment to reflect on the growth, changes, and obstacles that have been overcome. This celebration not only acknowledges the hard work but also reinforces your institution’s positive culture and its commitment to continuous improvement.
The Journey to Sustainable Development Starts Today
Successful organizational development requires a multiyear effort that encompasses careful planning, precise execution, and a dedicated team of leaders. From the initial 90 days to the subsequent years, each phase of the process moves your institution closer to becoming stronger and more agile.
Our team at Archer Education has helped dozens of institutions build and execute comprehensive multiyear strategic plans. These plans are tailored to enhance enrollment and retention, setting each institution on a path to long-term success.
If you’re ready to transform your organization and achieve remarkable results, reach out to us at Archer Education. Let’s make your educational vision a reality together.
Melanie Andrich is vice president of strategy and development at Archer Education. Melanie is a results-driven higher education leader with 20-plus years of experience in developing and supporting high-quality, accessible, and scalable academic programs and services. She spent the first half of her career at Rutgers University running study abroad programming and leading the first fully online professional master’s degree program for the university. She then moved into management consulting to help colleges and universities with academic innovation, enrollment management, and organizational transformation initiatives.
