Strategic planning process in public universities: critical issues and "loosely coupled" practice

Beginning in the late 1980s, the university system in Italy underwent an unprecedented process of change that, 40 years later, is still evolving. With the aim of aligning the Italian system to European standards and being more competitive, several legislative provisions have been enacted during the last 30 years that have revolutionized many of the established practices regarding university management. However, it must be highlighted that regulations alone have not always been able to generate substantial changes in the governance practices of universities (Cantele et al. 2012). Often, the impact has merely been a sterile adhesion to legislative obligations. With regard to the topic of this paper, compliance with the legislator's intentions would require considering strategic plans as real managerial mechanisms and practices. This imposes a shift of focus from the document that must be produced to meet quality assurance requirements to the organizational process that must be carried out to make the plan a tool that can effectively support governance in strategic management. Many universities, not just in Italy, have a strategic plan, but this is not sufficient to say that a good management practice has been introduced. Proponents of strategic planning emphasise the importance of process in improving strategic thinking. In particular, process studies assume that the key to understanding the effectiveness (or otherwise) of strategic planning may lie in seeing it as a complex, longitudinal approach to knowledge and action (Mintzberg 2007; Ferlie and Ongaro 2015), where governance engagement is key (Wahyudi, 2009). Unfortunately, in most Italian universities, governance shows mistrust towards these practices, due to a widespread resistance to change in defence of the old bureaucracy, which is, moreover, contested, feeding a vicious circle that undermines the development of an effective strategic planning process. In light of this premise, the objective of the paper is to propose an approach to effectively manage the strategic plan development process in public universities. The paper is articulated in 6 paragraphs. In the first paragraph, the peculiarities of public universities are presented, and in the second and third paragraph, the relevant literature is analysed. In particular, we refer to the literature on strategic planning and control in universities, focusing on the conditions of success/failure of strategic planning found in reality. Having identified the most recurrent anomalies and making use of the theories of organization that consider errors as real learning opportunities (McClamorch et al. 2001; Senge 1990; Schein 1985; Weick and Sutcliffe 2007). In the fourth paragraph, the research project is presented. The research method is detailed and the case of an Italian medium-sized university is described. This case seems particularly interesting because the university was completely lacking a strategic plan and, in proximity to the visit of the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research (ANVUR) for periodic assessment and accreditation (October 2019), needed to produce a credible and defensible plan in a relatively short time. The evaluation of the strategic plan submitted to ANVUR was very positive, and its implementation at this institution (2020) is currently (2021) under total control by the monitoring team. In the last two paragraphs, the case discussion and some concluding remarks are presented.