Content written by Rodney Alsup and published by the MBA News Digest.

“When you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget that the goal was to drain the swamp.”

Graduate program managers, staff, and faculty often find themselves up to their necks in program alligators – participating in program information sessions, meeting with students, reviewing applications, reviewing and revising website content, reviewing reports, attending faculty meetings, etc. These same program alligators are necessary, but they can cause a loss of focus and forgetting that the program swamp they are trying to drain is the education and development of graduate business students. Regaining and then maintaining the big picture focus is a challenge, but is more easily done when a well-defined program value chain is available as a reminder.

What’s an Academic Unit Value Chain?

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Harvard Professor Michael Porter first described the Value Chain Model in the early 1980s as the set of activities that are performed to deliver a product or service to the market. The graphic below presents my view of how an academic program value chain would look. The graphic provides a high-level generic view of the activities that an academic unit or program performs to educate students.

Note the value chain is first divided into two sets of activities, primary and support. On most campuses, control of support activities is from the campus level while primary activity control is at the program or academic unit level. One exception is the “Systems & Processes” support activities that often serve as a link between the campus and the program and between each of the program’s primary activities.

My logic for the primary activities included in the graphic goes something like this, good information management provides the information that curriculum managers need so they can develop and manage a high-quality curriculum that is available for enrollment managers to use for recruiting quality students so program managers can manage them through the program so they can become good alumni of the program. Underneath each of the five activities are an almost infinite number of sub activities. Most sub activities are program or academic unit specific.

What Purposes Can a Value Chain Serve?

Besides helping keep eyes on the big picture, the value chain can serve multiple purposes. Value chain diagrams may be useful for:

1) New employee orientation when discussing employee assignments and how they will interact with others.

2) Problem solving when identifying what program activities will be affected by proposed solutions.

3) Process design when a new process or system involves multiple activities.

4) Data and information management when multiple activities use the same information for performance reporting.

Value chain diagrams can serve many other uses and over the next few months, my blog articles will focus on the primary activities of the academic Value Chain including other uses.

Join the Conversation!

Question: Have you created value chain diagrams for your programs? In addition to the uses I identified above, have you identified others? Click here to share your response or email me at RGAlsup@MBANewsDigest.com if you prefer to respond without sharing.

Rodney

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