Directing the Energy
President's Planning process Ensures
Collective Effort, Optimal Results
Their surprise was audible.
“That was a parking lot when I was here,” said an alumnus, pointing to the Cancer Research Center.
“That building was a ball field,” said another as the bus cruised farther along.
“And that one? A motel.”
As Medical College of Georgia alumni found out during a Homecoming bus tour of campus last spring, they certainly can come home again. But they might not recognize it.
Georgia’s health sciences university has changed dramatically on many different levels in recent years, but the physical plant offers the most striking testimony to its progress.
New facilities on the scene in the past four years include the Cancer Research Center and Health Sciences Building (both under construction), phase two of the Interdisciplinary Research Building, the MCG Wellness Center and a new energy plant.
“These are the most tangible signs of our achievements,” says Dr. Daniel W. Rahn, who assumed the MCG presidency in 2001. “What we’ve been able to accomplish in spite of many challenges has, quite frankly, astonished me. We’ve invested millions in research infrastructure, repopulated our faculty, launched seven new academic programs, upgraded our information technology platform, revamped our financial infrastructure, made salaries nationally competitiveC9.”
He pauses, but only to come up for air. He hasn’t exhausted the list.
Yet as much as he enjoys enumerating MCG’s achievements, more important to President Rahn is citing their cause. “I attribute our success to everybody who gets up each morning and devotes another day’s effort to contributing to the mission,” he says. “I’ve been amazed by the resilience of our faculty and staff. It’s been very heartening, and it gives me great optimism about the future. If you direct the energy here on campus, the potential for advancement is just incredible.”
And how do you direct that energy?
President Rahn and his leadership team started by identifying 10 overarching priorities (see box on right). “In order to manage strategically, we developed a plan that required putting every resource on the table, then articulating and prioritizing goals to match the resources with the mission,” says President Rahn.
“We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin,” he says. “We want to engage in activities appropriate to our role, using our abilities and resources in the best possible way. So we identified a hundred-plus initiatives and went through them in a very deliberate process of aligning, prioritizing and putting a budget process in place.”
The
initiatives had to meet the litmus test of supporting the 10 priorities and
complementing the six values that characterize the work of MCG: leadership,
social responsibility, compassion, diversity, professionalism and excellence.
“It’s a living and breathing plan,” says Deb Barshafsky, vice president for decision support. “We designed processes to be lean, agile and nimble. If an opportunity presents itself, the process is fluid enough to easily fold that into the existing structure. And if something isn’t working, that becomes quickly apparent and manageable. We can’t wait too long to right the ship.”
The teamwork that evolved from the planning process inspired everyone to consider the best interests of the entire university, rather than their pockets of responsibility. “We’re all accountable to each other,” President Rahn says.
At a planning session held near the end of the fiscal year, the senior leadership team identified all available funds and aligned them with the institution's highest-level strategic initiatives. “As a result of collaborative and focused financial management,” says President Rahn, “we were able to use unexpended school and departmental funds at the institutional level to advance institutional initiatives. It was a real turning point.”
President Rahn and his team are now reallocating unexpended funds at monthly
planning sessions. “Essentially, we're re-budgeting in real time,” says Ms.
Barshafsky.
President Rahn notes that his experience in private practice forced him to develop business skills. That perspective-- coupled with his inherent bent toward fiscal conservatism-- makes the approach a no-brainer, in his estimation. “You can’t spend money you don’t have,” he says simply. But if everyone buys into collective goals and has a sense of ownership about MCG’s overall success, the pie suddenly seems larger because the emphasis has shifted from coveting individual slices. It may be an overstatement to say that walls have tumbled, he says, “but we’ve built windows into the walls.”
“By clarifying what we want to do as an institution, we’re better utilizing our resources,” says Ms. Barshafsky. “We decide, ‘We need X amount of dollars to make this work, and if we have the funding, we can leverage it to optimize the results.’”
That leveraging has been an incredible boon for the community and the state, notes President Rahn. “We give the state of Georgia a huge return on its investment,” he says, adding that state appropriations now account for only about a quarter of MCG’s core budget. And, as MCG generates its own funding through clinical and research activities, those in Georgia and beyond reap the benefits of its discoveries and innovations.
“We focus on the
diseases of greatest importance to Georgians: cancer, cardiovascular disease,
diabetes/obesity, infection/inflammation and neurological diseases,” says
President Rahn. The focus not only optimizes MCG’s impact “but enables us to
align fundraising with strategic processes,” he says.
MCG’s planning process hasn’t gone unnoticed by others. “I think this is a very novel approach for an academic institution,” says Ms. Barshafsky. “Other universities are impressed.”’
But President Rahn knows no system is infallible.
“Not everything we’re doing will be successful,” he says. “I don’t mind mistakes as long as they’re honest mistakes that we can quickly catch and correct. But I know our successes will greatly outweigh our missteps.
This is a great time at MCG. There are tremendous challenges, but the human capital and tools we have to work with and the opportunities available to us are just tremendous.”
- Christine Hurley Deriso
MCG's 10 Overarching Priorities
Visit http://www.iris.mcg.edu/plan/initiatives.asp for more information. |
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