Notes about the Systems Portfolio as a whole
AQIP has reviewed the Notes presented here to make sure they conform to AQIP and HLC policies, and to ensure they present sensible strategies and useful practices for Systems Portfolios. Every organization preparing a Systems Portfolio is not obligated to follow the advice presented here, but organizations can be confident that heeding this advice will not mislead them. Notes pages are locked, and only AQIP can change them.
View or contribute to Support about the Systems Portfolio as a whole
As a whole, the Systems Portfolio is a tool for developing a better, fuller understanding your your organization for the people who work for it and for the people who have a stake in its success. is It is also an aid to maintaining accreditation, but that is a subsidiary function, best viewed as secondary rather than primary.
In-depth responses
AQIP wants every institution to CONFRONT every item in the Categories, but recognizes that different institutions are in different places developmentally, and that not everyone will have, say, a succession plan, or comparative performance results for their human resource processes. By having everyone write an answer -- cursory or in-depth -- to every question, but by allowing everyone to focus their attention (by writing in-depth responses on those items where they actually want and need feedback), AQIP allows the Sustem Portfolio to be customized to each institution's current situation.
The goal of distinguishing "in depth" from other responses (which we could name "cursory" or "brief") is to prevent institutions that are creating Systems Portfolios from wasting too much of their limited space (100 pages or 50,000 words) answering items for which they have no substantive answer. If the real answer to an item is "We don't have a process for this right now" or "We have no measured performance results in this area at present", we'd prefer for them to say so, briefly and directly, realizing that this item represents for them an opportunity for future improvement.
But AQIP doesn't want an AQIP institution to write an entire Systems Portfolio with brief or cursory answers, and we don't want institutitions to "skip," intellectually, issues they should be thinking about. So we made a rule that a minimum of 1/3 of all responses must be "in-depth" -- serious, intelligent, substantive discussions of the issue raised in the item.
We could define "in depth" as answers of 10 (or 30, or 50) words or more, but it's easy to imagine an institution saying "we don't do this" in 500 words, so defining "in-depth" by number of words written is pointless. If you have nothing much to describe in your response to an item, it's not an in-depth response, no matter how many words you devote to it.