Good Governance
In addition to doing “the right things” things we should try to do them well. There is little value in being right without being effective. How do determine if shared governance is working well though?
Governance
Shared governance is a type of governance, hence we can use the same approach that we use to measure good governance. Coincidentally we are currently going through the process of demonstrating our campus’s good governance, namely the Middlestates re-accreditation process.
Middlestates and Software Quality
One approach is to directly evaluate how well we are fulfilling our mission of improving students’ lives. Using a variety of measures we could attempt to measure the impact attending SUNY Plattsburgh has. Although possible this is not practical because of the difficulty and expense. Many of the benefits that students accrue are not easily measured and gathering information from all of them would be both intrusive and expensive. The alternative is to examine the processes that we have on campus and check that those processes are aligned with the mission, are successfully implemented, and actually effective in their stated goals. Although this is still a large undertaking it is more feasible than looking at the impact the college has on each student.
Software development faces a similar dilemma. It is possible to measure software products directly (for quality, security, usability, etc), the problem is that any change to the software would invalidate the previous testing. Since software is frequently updated (e.g., weekly or even daily) it is not feasible from an expense and timing point of view to test each individual release, rather software quality is assured by appraising the quality of the processes used to build the software. In contracts that are put out to bid there are usually requirements that the company have a certain level of process quality in place and third-party certification (similar to colleges and regional accreditors).
To talk about good governance we want to look at process quality, so what does process quality mean?
Processes
In an earlier post I claimed that People ( the employees ) were the most important part of an endeavor, so what makes Processes important? Processes are important because they are the glue that lets everyone work towards a shared goal. If you are working by yourself, or in a very small team then you might not need a process. As an organization gets larger though processes become increasingly important. This is because Processes facilitate shared understanding and trust.
In a large organization tasks are split between multiple people, each with their own roles and responsibilities. Processes define who is responsible for which parts of the task. Without good processes work either gets duplicated by multiple people, or parts of the task get missed because people were assuming those parts were taken care of by someone else. With a well defined and executed Process in place then each person knows their role and trusts that the other participants are handling the other parts. So, how can we tell if a particular Process is a good one or not?
The software development field provides a good example of how this can be done. There are different approaches, but a popular one is the Capability Maturity Model Integration. This approach defines five maturity level of processes:
Initial - People have some heuristics about how to get things done, but no well defined processes that are followed every time. Not much planning, mostly reactive. ( Plans in this context mean specific, implementable lists of tasks. Planning in our context is often more aspirational. )
Managed - There are some well defined processes for individual parts of the organization, but there are many gaps in how things are done. Still fairly reactive.
Defined - There are processes in place for all of the organization’s activities. There is some oversight of processes and refinement of them. At this level there should not be much time spent in reactive activities ( which would indicate gaps in the organization’s processes ).
Quantitatively Managed - At this level processes should include activities that review the quality of the projects and products (e.g., student learning ) and make adjustments to improve them.
Optimizing - Processes should be introspective, identifying not only how to improve the products and projects, but also how to improve the processes too.
For Middlestates, they are looking for the college to be at the equivalent of level four or five. That we have processes for everything, and not only are the processes doing what they need to do ( for the mission ), but there is an introspective element for us to continuously improve.
Using a similar framework we can look at shared governance. As discussed in the previous post shared governance currently is not baked into all of our processes. So one area to improve is improve our participation in existing processes. We should also think about how we can be introspective about shared governance and how to improve it. In the next post we’ll look at the Faculty Senate and some potential measures of its effectiveness.