Southern Virginia Higher Education Center is advancing economic opportunities in rural Virginia with strategy execution and performance management excellence

At Envisio, we work with many public sector organizations set on bettering their corner of the world–however, the mission and mandate of the team at the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center (SVHEC) is as admirable as any.

“Our mission is to advance the economic potential of rural Southern Virginia,” says Dr. Betty Adams, the Executive Director at SVHEC. “After the tobacco industry left, our economy was decimated and people started leaving Southern Virginia to find work. But that has changed and now there are jobs in the region, and we’re really focused on providing access to educational opportunities, including degrees and job training necessary for people to find work locally and stay here, stay home.”

To do so, Dr. Adams and her team are using their extensive backgrounds in strategic planning and performance management, in concert with Envisio’s software and services, to optimize their efforts for both efficiency and effectiveness. This powerful partnership has helped them take their efforts to the next level.

“We found out some good news recently,” says Dr. Adams. “Halifax County launched its community strategic plan in 2018, and when the five-year update was made we found out that the County has actually reversed the earlier population loss. SVHEC has helped change that trend, which is a really, really good thing.”

An economy in transition is an opportunity for innovation

In times of duress, exceptional leaders find opportunity inside of challenges. Dr. Adams, her team, and SVHEC partners have taken on the educational and workforce readiness challenges facing area employers and helped chart a path towards improved prosperity.

“We’re located in Southern Virginia, which is rural,” she says. “I was born and raised here, this is my hometown–but when I finished my undergraduate degree, there weren’t many available or desirable jobs in the area. I ended up going to another state in order to find a job and to build my career. Then in 2008, I had the opportunity to apply for the job at SVHEC and had the opportunity to come home. I’m now in my sixteenth year as Executive Director, and it’s been the best job I’ve ever had, with the best people I’ve ever worked with.”

This exceptional team is pioneering a model that is wholly unique inside the world of higher education. As Dr. Adams explains:

“The model of higher education developed by the center is unique,” she says. “It is unlike anything I’ve seen in other states. The Commonwealth of Virginia supports five higher education centers including ours, and like the SVHEC, most of them are located in rural areas where people might not otherwise have access to four year degrees and hands-on technical training.”

“Historically, we were a farm and factory economy, but that’s changed. Our community leaders wanted our residents to be ready for an economy that required skilled workers, but they couldn’t convince the Commonwealth to establish either a two or four-year institution. That’s when our community leaders came together with educational partners and developed what would become our center. In 2005, we were designated a state agency and that meant we could access more funding and grow.”

The model being pioneered by the team at SVHEC gives them the flexibility to plan strategically, respond dynamically, and make decisions driven by data.

“After being designated a state agency, we recognized that we needed to better understand how our model would work and that without a strategic plan, we wouldn’t be around very long,” says Dr. Adams. “Our secret sauce is education, collaboration, and innovation. I spent a lot of time working in traditional higher education institutions, but I was always frustrated by how they didn’t want to try new and different things. There was a lot of bureaucracy, and we don’t have those same things stopping us here. As a higher education center, we can do some really cool things, like developing our IT Academy, Healthcare Training Hub, Career Tech Academy, and customized training as well as other in-demand technical workforce training solutions. These are really big pieces of who we are. We’re small, but we’re the little engine that could. I think I can, I think I can.”

“We’re really good at working with multiple partners to reach a common goal. We can achieve more because we have the synergy of all these partners. In Southern Virginia, nobody has all the resources to meet the needs of the community. That’s why it’s imperative that we work together.”

To understand how Dr. Adams and her team achieved these goals, we need to take a step back and look at their strategic plan, and how its foundation is drawn from the values of the organization.

“Our strategic planning process started around 2012, when we brought in a consultant to help us do it,” says Dr. Adams. “We held focus groups and interviews and surveys with all of our major stakeholder groups. We used the feedback to develop our strategic plan and update it every 2 years. More recently we recognized the need to clarify our values and include them in our employee work plans. We developed a set of values from the bottom up, and now we’re working to develop action items that tie the values directly into the employee work plans.”

SVHEC’s values are:

1. COLLABORATION: Working together with others to achieve a common goal, share ideas and skills, and learn from each other.
2. INTEGRITY: Demonstrating honesty, transparency, and ethical behavior in all actions and decisions.
3. RESPECT: Treating everyone with dignity, empathy, and fairness, regardless of their background or position.
4. INNOVATION: Encouraging creativity, continuous improvement, and the development of new ideas.
5. CUSTOMER FOCUS: Putting customer’s (internal & external) needs first; building strong relationships with customers.
6. STEWARDSHIP: Managing the resources, including human resources, entrusted to us with the utmost care and responsibility.

But having a strategic plan and corresponding values isn’t enough to ensure the plan doesn’t end up as a paperweight. Dr. Adams and her team were still struggling at times to track their progress and report results to the relevant parties.

“In some previous versions of the strategic plan, we struggled with communicating and reporting on plan progress,” she says. “There was no system in place for identifying who was doing what, and what benchmarks we needed to hit. We were sort of keeping track in MS Word documents and infographics, but it just wasn’t very efficient.”

While wrestling with these inefficiencies, Dr. Adams and the team at SVHEC were forced to reconcile with the challenges brought on by COVID-19. Like many public sector organizations, the pandemic came with an onslaught of new challenges–but for innovative and solutions-oriented teams, challenges are often rife with hidden opportunities.

“During the pandemic, we couldn’t afford to bring in a planning consultant for the most recent version of our strategic plan so we did a lot of it ourselves–the surveys, the focus groups, everything,” says Dr. Adams. “We also had a number of studies and reports that informed some of our strategic decisions, and now we have five overarching strategic goals that are guiding us. But one of the other things that is different about this planning cycle is that we now have a chief strategy officer, Dr. Nettie Simon-Owens. In elevating her to this role, we knew we needed a software that would allow her to execute our strategic plan efficiently and effectively. And that’s when I found Envisio.”

“I really liked what I read about Envisio. It was used by a lot of governments, nonprofits, and other educational groups and that is important, because we’re so different from businesses. I signed up for a demo and was just blown away. We’ve been so pleased with the product. It has exceeded all of our expectations” said Dr. Adams.

Hope Harris-Gayles, Director of Communications, Outreach and Employee Relations at SVHEC, says as an added bonus, you can also use dashboards as an internal tool to benchmark progress and see project status updates.

“Onboarding Envisio has been a really smooth experience,” Hope says. “I really like that the platform includes some project management tools, so it allows us to break down huge goals into bite-sized pieces. And because we can now see what everyone is doing, and what everyone’s priorities are, we can provide assistance as needed. In talking to colleagues, I’ve heard a lot about how it has been useful for finding help across the organization. It’s also very user-friendly, and it was easy for the dashboard pieces to come together. The onboarding experience and the Envisio team have made it such a great experience.”

In addition to building out dashboards, the SVHEC team is also making use of the new AI features recently integrated into the Envisio platform–doing so has made providing updates and generating reports much easier for staff.

“The new AI features have been very helpful for us when we’re creating and updating our objectives and action steps,” says Dr. Simon-Owens. “Oftentimes, AI provides viable options for how our entries are written that we can review and refine to meet our preferences as well as what is included in reports. The end result is a more comprehensive body of work.”

With excellent dashboards, an engaged staff, a great strategic plan and public-facing dashboards already online, the future is bright for this innovative and forward-thinking institution! As Dr. Simon-Owens concludes:

“Having the additional accountability is important, I also think Envisio is great to have so that employees are actively engaged in operationalizing the organization’s strategic plan and achieving desired outcomes. Our strategic plan is a living document that we refer to, that we update, and that we are talking about a lot more as a result of Envisio.”