The Starbucks Method: 7 Things Higher Ed Can Learn About Institutional Effectiveness
Behind the pumpkin cold foam and cinnamon sprinkles is a finely tuned operation that constantly monitors, measures, tweaks, and improves. In higher education, we call this Institutional Effectiveness: the ongoing practice of evaluating whether you're doing what you said you'd do and making changes when you're not. Even if this means that the thing you used to do before is more effective than the thing you’re doing now.
Demystifying Goals, KPIs, and Benchmarks
We see a lot of institutions struggle with differentiating between their goals, their KPIs (key performance indicators), and their benchmarks (achievement measures). This confusion is understandable because, although we all intuitively use and blend these concepts in our daily lives, we are rarely forced to separate, categorize, and define them by their specific purposes.