Continuous Improvement in Higher Education

Bâton Global team members have first hand experience in providing higher education institutions with high-impact guidance to keep up with the demands of stakeholders. How can your institution overcome some of the most prevalent challenges to continually improve facilities and services to meet the multiple demands of diverse stakeholders?

Resource Constraints

Implementing more innovative facilities and services demanded by stakeholders is often challenging due to resource constraints. Current yearly projects and expenses take priority over long-term projects that propose to update existing facilities or improve current processes. Top administrators who make resource decisions face taking into account not only the desires of current stakeholders, but also those of future stakeholders.

Implementing an institution-wide climate survey provides all stakeholders an opportunity to share where they feel innovation and improvements need to occur. This provides insight into how all stakeholders feel the organization can improve, which can be leveraged in the budgeting process to optimize the distribution of limited resources.

Rigid Educational Structures

Educational structures are often not adaptive and responsive enough to meet the increasing demands of students, faculty, employers, and accreditation bodies. For example, the approval of budget requests from student organizations or internal departments often require action by multiple entities and thus the process takes a great deal of time within the organization.

Bâton Global has experience reforming such rigid structures and processes that may delay projects. Continuous improvement plans that involve streamlining procedures and providing a more flexible, adaptive structure can lead to more responsive processes that allow administration to incorporate demands from all entities of the organization.

5- and 10-Year Plans Become Outdated

Developing 5- and 10- year plans can provide guidance to institutions and organizations, but they often become outdated due to emerging technologies, increased competition, globalization, and changes in stakeholder requests. Bâton Global has found that while developing lengthy master plans, institutions and organizations develop inflexibility and lack the ability to keep up with new and prominent demands.

Developing continuous improvement plans that keep long-term goals in mind while also allowing for shifts in external and internal influences allows for greater flexibility and an opportunity for all stakeholders to impact the development of long-term objectives.

Stakeholder Conflict

In implementing new initiatives and improvements within an institution or organization, stakeholders often seek to influence decisions according to the priorities of their specific team or business unit. Bâton Global brings industry expertise to clients to help mitigate the political issues that negatively influence long-term planning.

Bâton Global has implemented continuous improvement processes for clients from the unit level up to the entire organization. The implementation of more flexible and responsive plans allows all stakeholders to participate in the identification and prioritization of objectives, develop shared key success measures, and align their corresponding initiatives. Clients are able to incorporate the demands of all stakeholders while also achieving long-term initiatives.

How can Bâton Global help your institution navigate these challenges?