Best Strategic Planning Software for Higher Education: Success Factors

Universities and colleges today face increased pressure from shifting revenue streams, changing student requirements, and growing public scrutiny. With all the volatility and uncertainty in this dynamic environment, the role of finance is being reshaped. How? It’s transitioning from managing finances to playing a critical role in strategic decision-making. To facilitate that transition, higher-ed finance teams are looking to implement the right tools, processes, and data analytics. With the right tools in place finance gain efficiencies, better insights, and more confidence in the future when building strategic plans.

Institutions must thus turn to the best strategic planning software for higher education to automate processes, improve foresight and agility, and align with budgeting and forecasting processes.

What is Strategic Planning?

According to Gartner, strategic planning defines how an institution will realize its strategic ambitions for the future.

Typically, strategic planning is used to do the following:

• Articulate the institution mission and vision
• Create a clear roadmap of initiatives, actions, and investments
• Evaluate revenue and resource allocation in support of strategic goals
• Prioritize services, initiatives, and programs
• Foster organizational alignment

Why Does Strategic Planning Matter?

Strategic planning helps finance leaders model the institution as it exists today and then explore possible strategies over the top. What types of strategies? Changes in revenue streams, capital projects, and new programs are some examples. Through this proactive approach, stakeholders can visualize plausible future scenarios and their corresponding impacts. Strategic planning thus offers a storytelling tool for stakeholders at colleges and universities to better understand the future impact on the institution and student outcomes, within resource constraints.

Plus, internally, strategic planning is a powerful way to set the direction and prioritization of an institution. Why? The planning completes a cohesive feedback loop. First, the strategic plan drives the budget and resource allocation. Then actuals drive revisions to the forecast. And finally, forecast changes influence the strategic plan in future years (see Figure 1). This feedback loop ensures universities are aligned on effectively allocating resources and maximizing the impact for students.

What Are the Critical Success Factors for the Best Strategic Planning Software for Higher Education?

Strategic planning software helps university finance teams improve efficiency, insights, and confidence in the strategic plan and position the university for long-term success.

When developing plans to support strategic planning and other finance processes, teams need solutions with the financial intelligence, control, and scale required for institution-wide planning. Finance must thus consider several critical factors since it’s taking steps to modernize planning processes with software.

Strategic planning software solutions should include the following helpful capabilities:

1. Centralize data and ensure quality control. The foundation of a reliable strategic plan lies in accurate and timely data to support confident funding and spending decisions. In addition, the data used for the strategic plan must be consistent and aligned with the data used for other financial planning processes, including the budget. By keeping a unified feedback loop for planning processes, institution teams can be aligned driving towards achieving the mission and strategic objectives.
2. Integrate financial statements. Institutions often focus primarily on the Statement of Activities. But modeling the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement in the strategic plan also has significant value. Why? In an ideal world, institutions would have endless cash. But finance leaders today typically have financial constraints and must therefore prioritize and balance funding to ensure long-term financial sustainability.
3. Conduct scenario analysis. Scenario planning helps institutions be more resilient and adaptable. To complete the process, institutions must first identify a range of possible future conditions and then easily develop and compare plans to respond to each condition.
4. Automate calculations and logic. Implementing a software solution that automatically brings data together, leverages standard calculations, and easily performs wide-ranging scenarios is a game-changer for higher-ed finance teams to implement a solution quickly with confidence.
5. Utilize dashboards & visuals to tell a story. Dashboards and visualizations are powerful storytelling tools for the strategic plan. In fact, effective dashboards help guide decision-making with a varied audience. The ability to quickly visualize data trends, impacts of initiatives and economic drivers, and core financial KPIs over time becomes possible with dashboards and reports. And those capabilities enable better and faster decision-making.

Given these requirements, only one software solution stands out: OneStream.

OneStream for Higher Education Strategic Planning

OneStream is a leading enterprise finance solution trusted by institutions. It offers a comprehensive platform that uniquely unifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, and analysis. Why is OneStream a leader? Only OneStream brings all finance processes into a single solution. With a unified solution, institutions benefit from seamless integration between data, people, and processes – achieving alignment that helps each institution achieve its mission and vision (see Figure 2). How?

With robust strategic planning features, OneStream offers the following benefits to colleges and universities:

• Aligns all financial (including the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement) and operational data with a built-in data-quality engine and pre-built connectors. These features provide finance teams with trusted and consistent data for all planning processes, ensuring confidence in the data.
• Allows finance to align the strategic plan with the budget, in-year forecasts, and other planning processes across the institution. OneStream uniquely eliminates the complexity of having to manage multiple solutions, interfaces, and integrations, eliminating the duplication of data and extra administrative tasks.
• Supports the complexity, growth, and evolution of institutions over time without reimplementing or adding more technical debt. This unique feature enables institutions to easily adapt the platform to advance evolving needs.
• Enables scenario planning that helps universities understand possible outcomes and have a plan in place to react. This ability improves the accuracy and effectiveness of planning efforts and helps finance become a strategic partner to the institution.

Conclusion

Predicting the future remains uncertain, to be sure. But the best strategic planning software for higher education equips finance leaders with the foresight and agility to capitalize on opportunities and navigate potential changes. Finance can then leverage integrated data solutions, automated calculations, scenario planning frameworks, and impactful visualizations. Through those aspects, higher-ed finance teams will improve efficiency, insights, and confidence in the strategic plan – ultimately positioning the institution for long-term success.

Learn More

Discover more about how OneStream uniquely empowers higher education finance teams to enhance planning, gain new insights, and streamline finance processes.

https://www.onestream.com/solutions/higher-education/

And if you’re ready to take the leap from spreadsheets or legacy solutions and start your finance transformation with OneStream, let’s chat!