Visualizing Strategy

Lately I've been engaged in creating metrics for strategic planning, and wanted a way to visualize the more important links between them. After some trial and error, our group came up with a neat representation in the form of a logic model. Here's a bit of it.

The boxes are numbers to be formally tracked. Some of the detail is hidden--for example there are different yield rate targets for different kinds of applicants, and "Discount Rate" hides the particulars of financial aid policies. The solid blue lines show the influence of administrative units or other groups. The dotted lines are causal links between metrics. The yellow arrows show natural tensions between metrics, like selectivity and yield rates, which pull in opposite directions. Finally, the color coding of the boxes is to identify certain strategic initiatives. Blue is "financial strength," for example.

The diagram is accompanied by a spreadsheet describing in more detail what the metrics are. It's color coded the same way, by objective.

I have found this diagram very useful in having conversations with administrators, to give a sense of everyone pulling together for a common cause. The tool used is Microsoft Publisher, which you probably have already installed on your machine.

Visualizing Enrollment Change with Class Trajectories

Visualizations like graphs and animations are of obvious value in presenting data. One of the more useful ones I've found for visualizing enrollment is what I call a class trajectory graph, an example of which is shown below (with made-up data).

It shows three classes for four-year programs entering in fall 2000, fall 2001, and fall 2002. The right-most point on each of the trajectories is the first year for those students, and shows enrollment and net revenue per student (tuition minus institutional aid). Multiplying those two numbers gives net revenue for the whole class, which can be compared to the level curves graphed. So one can see that the freshman year for the 2000 entering class netted the institution around 9 million dollars. As time goes on, the classes get smaller because of attrition, so the next point on the blue line is to the left. Also note that net revenue per student fell somewhat. This is normal as students with leaner aid packages attrit at a higher rate. In the second year, the 2000 entering class netted the institution a little less than $7.5M. The entering 2001 class was bigger and produced more revenue per student, so the right-most pink point is up and to the right. It generated about 12 million its first year.

These trajectory graphs quickly convey important information. How bad is attrition, and what does it cost us in net revenue? How big are the classes comparatively? What are overall trends in class sizes--useful for planning everything from budgets to residence halls to class offerings. This is an essential graph for your strategic dashboard.

Bonus. Here are two other two visualizations just for fun. The first one [here] shows you how zip codes are clustered. Could be useful for something, I suppose, but mainly neat to play with.

The second [here] is just plain (or plane in this case) cool. The video shows world-wide flights over 24 hours.