Yesterday, however, an interesting thing happened. The impact of organizational issues finally made itself known on the project level. One of the institutions is going through a major restructuring following a change at the helm. For a few weeks, change has been in the air, but nothing was finalized. Now, people have been formally moved into new positions and responsibilities, with a gradual shifting to occur from the old to the new. There's a fair bit of confusion about who will be doing what, as the idea is to let it "emerge". As a result, the working teams for the project have all been either disrupted or at least impacted.
My instinct tells me that this is not a good time to be pushing a major collaboration. The other, larger institution is a driving force, but the smaller one is critical to the collaboration. Once the dust settles, and new programs begin to get developed, they can incorporate new visions, but at the moment everyone is focused on their jobs, their colleagues, and trying to get their heads around their new jobs. More importantly, the smaller institution has not included any resources for the partnership in the next budget year, limiting its potential for involvement.
As a result, I think the best thing is to down-scale the expectations for the next few months. rather than coming up with a far-reaching system, I'm going to focus just on the most immediate tasks. That means that solutions to problems will be shorter-lasting, but more fitting to the immediate situation. For example, we don't need to have the grading rubrics from three faculties match up (which would be needed for a sustained initiative); we'll just match them up between whichever two most need to articulate courses at the moment.
It will be much easier, but it's disappointing because the lack of a larger vision and the associated lack of planning to leverage the necessary resources will reduce the quality of the initiative and make it much more difficult to move forward. I've experienced this a number of times: someone near the top of an institution has a great idea, but underestimates the working process, time and resources required. As a result, the vision cannot be fully carried out.
The solution: for every great idea, there needs to be a four to five month incubation period until the full depth of the project is known. I suspect this is a critical point in emergent program planning, when vision meets reality. At that point, a review of resources needs to be made, and the scope and depth of the project needs to be re-visited. Like the market "corrections" we're going through right now, there needs to be a "project correction", so that outcomes are again realistic and achievable.
In the months ahead, we'll be launching a number of partnership courses, and getting started on the planning of the new diploma programs. We'll be taking the planning process right down to the program level, instead of working at the much larger partnership level. It seems as if the project now has three elements: developing and sustaining the partnership systems (marketing, financial, administrative), launching individual courses (articulations, course outlines, teacher exchanges, logistics) and developing diploma programs.
