de Wit

Identify the Gaps

 

You have limited resources, a small team or budget, more and more to do... are you sure you are focusing resources in the right places? Maybe you need to increase the number of applications to your programs. Or you need Investment Banking to recruit at your school. Knowing what your symptoms are is the first step in allocating resources strategically. de Wit& will take a close look at your institution's organizational, operational and strategic capabilities in Admissions and Enrollment Management, Marketing and Branding and Career Services and recommend changes to better position your school and add value to your stakeholders.

 

Over the course of one to two weeks, a member of our team will visit your school and look "under the hood". Areas of inquiry will include: systems used, national and international outreach plans, yield initiatives, employer relation activities, on campus opportunities for candidates and recruiters, marketing collateral used, branding initaives, and alumni relations efforts, to name a few. 

 

Our efforts will uncover areas of unrealized value and suggest potential innovations, changes and initiatives designed to impact revenue, increase the size and quality of your applicant pool, enhance placement and reputation and become a more effective organization overall.

 

This becomes ingredient number one of our Strategic Plan.

 

 

 

Perform Benchmark Intelligence

 

Whether you love or hate them, rankings represent an excellent, cost-effective source of benchmarking intelligence that can be used to make more informed strategic decisions.

 

To build a competitive benchmark analysis for your b-school, we first work with you to select a competitive benchmark group. The benchmark group may be based on location, type of school, schools where candidates are sending GMAT scores to in addition to yours, schools where your top employers recruit, etc. While you don’t have to be ranked to conduct this exercise, your benchmark group does.

 

We then choose the ranking(s) for our analysis which may include the Financial Times, US News & World Report, and The Economist, and within the ranking, the key criteria we need to focus on. Finanally, we identify the criteria where your institution falls below the average of your competitive group to find potential explanations for the difference.

 

This becomes ingredient number two of our Strategic Plan.

 

(Couple this service with our Training Initiatives and arm your Admissions, Recruiting, Outreach and Career Services teams with a powerful weapon to make them more effective in their sales and placement efforts.)

 

 

 

Build a Strategic Plan

 

Strategic Planning is the process of defining direction and making resource allocation decisions to get there. A good Strategic Plan is ambitious, comprehensive and empowering, and includes clear metrics to monitor and track progress and performance over time.

 

Whether you need a Plan for the institution as a whole or for a specific department like Admissions, Enrollment Management or Career Services, we can help. We base our work on two ingredients: a Gap Analysis, which helps us understand where we are; and Benchmark Intelligence, which allows us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. 

 

Once the Strategic Plan is built, the next step is effective communication to and engagement of all stakeholders involved including staff, faculty, students, recruiters and alumni.

 

(Couple this with our Training and Team Effectiveness services to ensure alignment across your key teams.)