As a Managing Consultant at Citisoft, I often work with clients who ask us to provide an objective Strategic Assessment of their Current State and a Roadmap for their future organization, including new tools to support their investment and operational departments. It strikes me how some of the skills and activities I use at work are called upon in my daily life.
In fact, I am seeing this comparison unfold at this very moment! My family is at the stage in life where college search discussion monopolizes most conversations. When the topic strays, it inevitably comes back to college, front and center. “Can you see yourself going there?” “What about Faber College? I hear Larry Kroger got a full ride to go there…” I’ve been accused of approaching most things in life like a strategic project, and the college selection process is no exception. I believe that any worthy undertaking would benefit from a formulaic approach. It can help make what would otherwise seem an insurmountable task not only achievable, but lead to the best possible outcome.
The first step in the college selection journey is making an Assessment. Each child is different. Each comes with a record of achievement, their own unique skills set and talents, and their individual hopes and dreams for the future. But one thing is necessary at the start, an honest reckoning of where the child stands, based upon their grades, their skills and interests, and a practical understanding of where they want to be in the future. As in consulting, only once you’ve assessed the requirements, can you set upon the task of focusing and narrowing down the search for the right bastion of higher learning.
The next step in our journey is to create a Roadmap. Once you and your college bound scion have logged your assessment it’s time to plan out each step of the way on how to get there. The calendar is of critical importance, for studying, test dates, application deadlines, campus visits, etc. Bring out the spreadsheet! A detailed plan of what, when, where and how you will complete all the necessary tasks will bring you comfort and lay out a path for a successful college search.
It is important that the family agree upon the road ahead in order to Gain Buy-In. Without proper agreement as to the tasks involved, and how to deal with the many challenges which inevitably will arise along the way, our college search is doomed. We see this with some of our clients, the greater organization has to be on-board to execute the Roadmap in order to be successful.
Now that we have Buy-in, we then set about Identifying the tools and players. The idea here is to create a long list, based on a broad set of criteria, some of which we glean from our assessment, which can be whittled away as we define and refine our Requirements. To do so we’ll need to record our absolute needs, such as a strong science program, or a school that offers business degrees. Next, we list what we would really want, like a city school versus a rural campus, or the school’s proximity to home. Then it wouldn’t hurt to document the “nice to haves…”, e.g. good food! At Citisoft we can’t emphasize enough with our clients the need to collect solid requirements and to distinguish between need-to-have and nice-to-have. A complicated system implementation will fall short when a product has the enticing bells and whistles but doesn’t meet the core requirements of the user.
Once we’ve established our requirements it’s time to go to work researching and narrowing down the large pool of candidate colleges and universities. Ultimately, we’ll need to come up with a legitimate group of target schools that will comprise our Short List.
From short list to matriculation, done properly, entails many steps. Completing the application, or RFP if you will, requires thought, focus and painstaking attention to detail. There is Due Diligence that must be applied, campus visits, information sessions, interviews etc. Then comes cost analysis, budgeting and funding options analysis. There are countless pieces to this puzzle that must be Evaluated and that hopefully all come together in the end when the ultimate Partner school is Selected, and we enter into a Contract by submitting our deposit.
College search is not to be taken lightly. It is a major endeavor that if done haphazardly can cost us, not just financially, but in real terms, the success or failure of our child’s college years are at stake. The consultant’s approach may seem exhaustive, but I wouldn’t approach it any other way for my kids. Whether you too are a parent of a college hopeful, or an investment company looking to increase your efficiencies, consider a strategic methodology – it will greatly improve your probability of success and perhaps lessen the stresses of make-or-break decisions!
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