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Office of Operational Strategic Initiatives OSI
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Strategic Planning & Initiatives

Discover how OSI can partner with you to achieve your strategic priorities and accelerate business excellence. 

OSI serves as an agile, objective, and analytical team whose mission is to continuously advance the framework for sustainable excellence.  Review some of our advisory services below to discover how we can help you and your team!  If you would like to partner with us or if you would like to learn more, email us at osi@ucsd.edu or use our contact request form.

Strategy

  • Strategic Planning 
    • Define your strategy and prepare your team to successfully execute your tactical and strategic plans. 
    • OSI partners with diverse units and departments across campus to reveal the most significant initiatives that advance their strategic priorities and increase customer satisfaction.
    • OSI employs a data-driven and results-oriented strategic planning process that supports each aspect of your strategic planning needs.
  • Strategy Development
    • OSI assists units in aligning their strategic and annual plan/goals with the campus strategic plan, including facilitation of strategic retreats and related analytics and planning, as well as providing guidance on strategies that are holistic and integrate the perspectives of your customers, your staff, your business process KPIs, and key stakeholders.
  • Change Management
    • OSI integrates best practices in Change Management principles in all of our engagements.  Considering how teams and individuals will engage, adopt, or resist change can have a major impact on the success of your launch.
    • OSI has Prosci Change Management practitioners who partner with you to define your change strategy, develop change management plans, and diagnose gaps and manage resources.  Leveraging tools such as the Sponsor Roadmap, Communication Plan, and Stakeholder Analysis will improve a project success and sustainment.
  • Business Process Improvement
    • We assist units in balancing service excellence, operational efficiency, financial sustainability, and employee satisfaction.  OSI's team of Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Green Belt certified practitioners partner with your subject matter experts to identify and define areas for improvement. We lead teams in developing “as is” and “to be” process maps, assessing baseline performance metrics, and analyzing the root causes of issues. In collaboration with your team we recommend sustainable changes that empower you to better serve our UC San Diego community.
  • Strategy Development & Execution
    • We assist units in aligning their strategic and annual plan/goals with the campus strategic plan, including facilitation of strategic retreats and related analytics and planning, as well as providing guidance on strategies that are holistic and integrate the perspectives of your customers, your staff, your business process KPIs, and key stakeholders.

Facilitated Retreats and Sessions

  • Facilitation
    • OSI staff are independent and objective facilitators with institutional knowledge who design and facilitate group sessions.  Whether you have a group of two or 100+ we facilitate confidential or public sessions designed to meet our clients' objectives.
  • Team Retreats & Trainings
    • OSI will partner with you to identify your goals and learning objectives, then identify and tailor our training to ensure success.  These sessions are useful when preparing for upcoming initiatives, are opportunities for professional development, and serve as team building and staff engagement drivers.
    • OSI provides training resources in addition to developing and presenting targeted sessions to develop a wide array of professional skills focused on business excellence. 
  • Tailored Focus Groups
    • OSI fosters an open dialogue across campus for those who are striving to deliver on the goals and strategies of the strategic plan through “in person” events to connect and share best practices and “virtual” discussions to allow for broader engagement.

Operational Excellence

  • Organizational Alignment 
    • OSI facilitates organizational realignments as a neutral and objective reviewer of financials, assets, resources, and business processes to ensure the “as is” quality is maintained/improved during the transition and that a framework is in place to deliver the business objectives of the realignment.
  • Performance Diagnostics & Improvements
    • OSI leads efforts to collect feedback on customer satisfaction and work engagement, conducting statistical modeling, and providing guidance on how to translate survey data into strategic actions. OSI leads annual campus-wide surveys of faculty, staff, and students and to optimize a department’s service and effectiveness.
  • Portfolio Evaluation & Management
    • We strive to partner on initiatives that deliver campus wide benefit and as such we prioritize our portfolio of opportunities to align with the Strategic Plan goals and strategies.

Organizational Reviews and Transformations

  • Articulating Impact
    • We assist units in demonstrating departmental impact and alignment to the strategic plan through the development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), data visualization, performance dashboards, and the drafting and publishing of impact reports.
  • Growth & Financial Models
    • We provide financial analysis and forecasting for expenditure and revenue outlooks, deep dive business models to understand cost and growth drivers and current funding mechanisms, and create modeling tools to assist with projections and what-if scenarios.
  • New Business Opportunities Analysis
    • OSI partners with leaders to facilitate, identify, vet, and define solutions or new ways of operation through solution finding, drafting business cases, understanding and articulating costs and benefits, and evaluating potential revenue and funding models to support innovative efforts.
  • Project Management
    • We provide experienced project managers on complex campus projects that drive results and deliver the desired outcomes by applying best practice methodologies for all phases of project management including initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling. 
  • Stakeholder Analysis
    • We leverage Prosci Change Management concepts to review the landscape of staff prior to a project launch to increase success with implementation and adoption.