A year has passed since Lviv Polytechnic approved a strategic development plan until 2025, which provides for the implementation of a number of projects, tasks and activities, as well as the creation of an environment that would motivate students, academic staff, researchers and all other employees. Liliia Zhuk, Vice-Rector for Education and Strategic Development, told us about important steps and preconditions for implementing this strategy.
Liliia Zhuk, is it relevant to talk about the implementation of the strategy during the forced transition to distance learning?
– This question was also controversial for me at first… I found the answer after watching an interview with one of the leading experts in the field of business efficiency, who emphasized that any challenge must be perceived not only as a problem – but as an opportunity. Now we have got the opportunity to look at everything differently, create something that have not existed before and improve what we have already been working on. Therefore, adherence to the strategic plan is especially important now, when almost the entire university is focused on distance work. One of the main conditions for achieving this goal written in our strategic plan is to adhere to the chosen strategy, despite the threats and tempting opportunities.
What is the role of the strategic development plan for the University?
– Strategy is an extremely important management tool that enables the University to adapt to changes in its environment, meet new challenges and be competitive. Now this is especially relevant for Lviv Polytechnic.
Our strategic goal is to become the best university in Ukraine according to international and national rankings. To achieve this, we need to implement five strategic goals and many tasks. The first of the goals is to attract talented young people, motivated to study, to our University. In addition, we need to create an environment conducive to learning, work and personal development. Also there are other goals. Developing this strategic plan, we primarily focused on making the goals achievable and taking into account the capabilities of Lviv Polytechnic.
However, creating a strategy is only part of the case. A lot depends on how to create a system for achieving goals and fulfilling tasks declared. A necessary precondition, without which it is impossible to achieve the goals set, is that the strategy must be supported by the employees of all units.
It is also very important to inform employees of the criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of work and understanding the appropriateness of the choice of these criteria. After all, all the criteria used in our university methods of assessment are directly related to the methods of international and national rankings.
The implementation of our strategic development plan provides an opportunity to reflect the results already achieved: all we can track the dynamics of tasks implementation on the website of Lviv Polytechnic.