Category Improvement Project.doc This document reflects the suggestions of the AQIP Coordinating Team at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan.

Your Organizational Overview is a brief (approximately five single-spaced pages or ten double-spaced pages) description that summarizes what is most important to your college or university and the key factors that are influencing your overall direction. It presents a concise account of what your organization is, why it exists, and where it wants to go.

This summary should help internal and external audiences understand what is relevant and important to your organization – the larger context for your strategic directions and Action Projects as well as your overall responses to the Context for Analysis (C), Processes (P), Results (R), and Improvement (I) questions found throughout the nine AQIP Categories. Your Organizational Overview will  ensure that the AQIP Systems Appraisers  understand the distinctive features that make your college or university unique.

Current AQIP organizations will  recognize that the Strategy for Action Workbook they created for the Strategy Forum was keyed directly to the questions for the Organizational Overview

Your Organizational Overview will address eight questions:

01.  What are the distinctive features of your organizational culture (type of control – public or private, non-profit or for-profit; purposes; vision; mission; and values)?

02.  What is the scope of your educational offerings?

03.  What is your student base (markets served and target populations, undergraduate and graduate, full- and part-time, traditional and non-traditional, enrollment by campus)?

04.  What collaboration exist between yours and other organizations (businesses, foundations, agencies, other colleges and universities, K-12 schools and school districts, bargaining units, etc.)?

05.  What is your faculty and staff base (numbers, types, full- and part-time status, educational level, and bargaining units)?

06.  What are the critical and distinctive facilities, equipment, and technologies upon which your organization depends and the regulatory environment within which you operate (size and location of campus, number of buildings, types of equipment and technologies, program accreditation, health and safety requirements, financial rules, a designated  “service area,” etc.?

07.  Which organizations are (or might be in the future) competing with you for students and/or for services and products you provide?

08.  What are your key opportunities and vulnerabilities as an organization?

In addition (but not part of the Organizational Overview’s page count) be certain to include a simple, easy-to-read organizational chart. You may also include a one-page glossary of acronyms and organizationally unique names to help readers of your Systems Portfolio follow your presentation.