In 2025, the University of Michigan Library underwent a nine-month strategic planning process. This community-driven, values-focused initiative resulted in a set of commitments and actions that will focus the library’s strategic work for the next five years.
And while we are just at the beginning of our journey to implement the work described in our strategic plan, we are already focusing our attention on how we will assess the progress we make towards our commitments and actions.
Below are more details about our assessment strategy for our strategic plan.
Community-suggested measures of success
Our goal was to create the library’s strategic plan through an inclusive, equitable process that would allow for deep engagement with the library community. In order to meet this aspiration, we offered a series of opportunities for colleagues from across the organization to provide input at various points in the strategic planning process.
Toward the end of the planning process, we held sessions to finalize our set of strategic commitments through community feedback. These sessions also included an activity to encourage colleagues to brainstorm potential measures of success for each commitment, using the following prompt questions:
- How might we measure our success?
- What does success look like?
- What will have changed so that you know we’ve made progress?
- What would be different?
These community-inspired “measures of success” articulate what progress means to us and how we will know we have achieved it. They serve as benchmarks to track growth, impact, and accountability over time.
Here’s an example: One of the library’s strategic action is focused on visibility of library services:
-
Visibility of Library Expertise and Services: Leverage campus and external relationships to increase awareness and understanding of library services.
And here are the potential measures of success, as developed during the strategic planning process:
- Improved satisfaction and awareness among faculty, student researchers, and campus staff regarding available library services and expertise (measured via campus survey).
- Increased understanding by the library community of the library’s communication/marketing strategy (measured via team check-ins, live and asynchronous community “pulse checks”, and/or informal conversations).
- Increased representation of library employees to share expertise in high-profile campus working groups or committees, research initiatives, plenary sessions, and conferences (measured via assessment of current representation and annual/bi-annual review).
The insights gathered during these sessions, as well as through an accompanying online survey, allowed us to identify meaningful measures of success generated by the library community for each strategic commitment. These suggestions were included in the library’s finalized strategic plan and shared with the entire organization.
Overall assessment strategy of the library’s strategic plan
As the library moved from the planning process to implementation, we wanted to continue to include library community input, especially as we developed an overall assessment strategy for the adoption of our strategic plan.
The Strategic Planning Implementation Core Team (a cross-departmental group formed to help guide the implementation of the library's shared commitments and actions) created a vision for our strategic planning work and defined three outcomes to help measure progress towards that foundational vision:
- The work towards our commitments and actions brings us together as a community.
- We have clarity about where we are heading and whether we’ve gotten there.
- Leadership is providing support and modeling good practices.
We structured our overall assessment strategy around these co-created outcomes. For each outcome, we included additional details regarding our assessment strategy, including the following:
- A description/definition of each outcome
- The methods we will use to assess the outcome
- Tentative assessment questions related to each outcome
- Specific metrics/measures for each outcome
- A timeline for assessing each outcome
- A tentative plan for how we’ll use what we’ve heard from our library community to inform future work
Over the lifetime of our strategic plan, our goal will be to successfully progress the stated outcomes by using a combination of annual library-wide surveys and small group conversations with colleagues actively working and leading our strategic work.
Targeted strategic action assessment
The library’s strategic plan includes seventeen distinct, yet related, strategic actions. In addition to determining an overall strategic plan assessment strategy, there is work towards determining targeted outcomes for each action.
To do this, we are asking action leads (members of library leadership responsible for the stewardship of strategic actions) to develop specific action outcomes. The creation of action outcomes will be influenced by library community members, using the measures of success created during the planning process as a starting point (see examples above related visibility of library services). Our goal is to avoid the creation of action outcomes in isolation, especially given their interdependence, and to provide opportunities for action leads to share their outcomes with each other and (eventually) the library community.
We are just starting these strategic action assessment conversations and imagine the creation of mini-assessment plans for each action that will be either executed by action leads and/or integrated into the overall assessment strategy for the library’s strategic plan.
The years ahead
As I mentioned, we are just at the beginning of implementing our new strategic plan. We hope to share more about our assessment strategy and activities (what we learn, what changes we make to our assessment plan) through future Tiny Studies blog posts.
Gratitude to the following colleagues and collaborators for their help in guiding my thinking about our strategic plan assessment: Craig Smith, Jeff Witt, Lauren Siebert, Scott Martin, the cosyn team (Joana Dos Santos, Eric Rodríguez and Roza Do), my colleagues in library administration, and the entire library community for participating in the strategic planning process.