How the University of Minnesota Reimagined Its Future

0:00:11.5 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today’s episode offers a case study in how to turn a comprehensive strategic review for a multi-campus system into a playbook that guides meaningful action. The discussion offers important lessons for a broad cross-section of higher education leaders who may be deciding whether and how to undertake similar reviews. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:42.7 Julia Philyaw: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Dr. Julia Philyaw and I’m a principal in EAB’s consulting practice. Consulting is a relatively new offering for us here at EAB and it’s designed to provide added support to higher education institutions that are advancing their most strategic priorities. One of the benefits of my job, probably the one that I love the most, is I get to collaborate and work with forward-thinking university leaders and strategists who are leading this work at their institution. With me today is one such individual. He is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Ryan Schmiesing. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan.

0:01:28.4 Ryan Schmiesing: Hi Julia, great opportunity to be here and I appreciate the conversation.

0:01:32.7 Julia Philyaw: Yeah, of course. Ryan, it feels like yesterday, but I know that it wasn’t. After a nationwide search, you were appointed to your position in April of 2025. Being in your seat now for just over a year, would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about your role, the institution, and really what you understood your mission to be when you first started?

0:01:57.8 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah, great. So it has been a whirlwind and fast 14 or 15 months now since I started April 1, basically, of last year. So the role is new for the University of Minnesota, Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, with a heavy initial emphasis on the strategic roadmap that we developed that was a comprehensive strategy document for the entire university, which is five campuses. So we have a campus in the Twin Cities, Crookston, Morris, Duluth, and our newest campus in Rochester, Minnesota. So that was the initial emphasis for this work and that’ll continue to carry out for the next four or five years as we go through the implementation phase of that and certainly reporting on our successes and monitoring the document and the plan and then how all of our campuses roll up to that as well. So overall, for the position and the role, certainly I understood that to be a big part of it.

0:03:02.9 Ryan Schmiesing: The other component of it that’s relatively large is you always have initiatives that come out of that plan or that come out of other work of the institution. So I spend a significant amount of my time on other major initiatives that contribute to the strategic roadmap, such as enrollment management that we’ve gone through a pretty extensive review process for and have campuses developing plans, all the way down to how do we get to a common academic calendar. So very specific initiative. So there’s projects like that that are just ongoing for us as an institution, a lot of it around how do we function and get the very best out of all of our campuses to contribute to one University of Minnesota.

0:03:50.5 Julia Philyaw: Yeah, and Ryan, I appreciate that. And I know working with President Cunningham and her vision, would you say that one of the principal focuses for the University of Minnesota so far, as you had pointed out, was really to have a comprehensive strategic review of everything from enrollment functions to the academic portfolio? You even brought in the other academic calendar, some of those more tactical things, but can you maybe tell us why the university chose to undertake such a comprehensive review and then maybe how you approached the strategic priorities? Because you mentioned both a strategic plan and then a strategic enrollment management plan. And you also leaned into the fact that the University of Minnesota is one university with five campuses. So kind of a huge undertaking, and if you can tell us a little bit more about that.

0:04:41.2 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah. So in some cases, the direction comes from conversations with the president and the Board of Regents about priorities for this particular administration and president. But certainly we saw great opportunity, I think, and the president has seen great opportunity in the strengths that each of our campuses bring to the state of Minnesota. And I think there’s the belief, and rightfully so, that, yeah, each campus is distinct in terms of its offerings, its priorities, where it sits, how it serves communities. Yet at the same time, when you begin to start to think about five campuses serving over 60,000 students, there’s power in how you talk about that. There’s power in how you can work across those five campuses to ensure that we offer an opportunity for every university or every individual in Minnesota who wants the University of Minnesota experience and meets qualifications.

0:05:41.3 Ryan Schmiesing: So certainly a priority of this president, and certainly a priority for the administration, is how do we leverage the strengths across all those campuses? We undertook a lot of initiatives simultaneously, certainly the strategic roadmap for the five-campus university. Now, each campus is undertaking planning that rolls up and ladders up to that roadmap. And at the same time, we engaged in an enrollment management review and planning exercise. That alone is significant, it’s part of our roadmap. We indicated we were going to do that, and then at the same time, there was a major emphasis on our branding and marketing strategies for the university. So three major initiatives that really probably not a lot of places do all at one time. But in this instance, things aligned that made a lot of sense to do that. It’s a lot of change at one time. I think we acknowledge that.

0:06:48.1 Ryan Schmiesing: So within that then you have to identify where are the greatest opportunities for us to make impact in a positive manner that brings the entire organization along rather than just implementing change, because just implementing the change isn’t going to be effective. So it’s how we bring the organization as a whole along. So there’s a lot of initiatives within the roadmap. Certainly the academic calendar is one. We had a whole effort on system optimization is what they called it. It’s really how do we function as a university, five-campus, and honoring the distinct priorities and focus of each of those campuses. And some of it’s timing and some of it’s, there’s projects that leverage other projects, right? So getting to a common academic calendar allows us to then potentially do other things like build an online hub, like ensuring that students can take classes seamlessly when appropriate across the five campuses.

0:07:52.7 Julia Philyaw: Yeah, and I love that you talked about that, Ryan, right? Because it talks about how you’re scaffolding and how all of the initiatives, while distinct, are interconnected and really advancing the institution as a whole. Having worked on college campuses and university campuses myself, I know that these strategic priorities are really important. And I also know that the day-to-day activities still are going on, right? So how did you and the president and the cabinet assess the internal capabilities and bandwidth of the staff and your faculty? And then when and how did you make the decision of maybe needing that external partner to come in and help advance these strategic priorities that you talked about?

0:08:33.7 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah, so I think that’s a great question and a great observation. Institutions, all institutions, but certainly one of the size and scope and scale of the University of Minnesota, has a set of things that we’re going to be doing regardless every day, and the work will go on as an institution. And at the same time, we know we have to have a set of priorities that builds on the strengths of the institution, allows us to demonstrate what makes us distinct and how we best serve the people of the state and beyond. So the first thing is, I think you have to have a… Don’t have to, but a position like mine that helps focus on the priorities so that the business of the institution can continue. And then you begin to look at what’s the business of the institution that aligns with the priorities that we’ve identified. So if you look at our strategic roadmap, we were very clear that we were building on the strengths of this institution. So in some ways, the business of the institution is the strategic roadmap.

0:09:43.0 Ryan Schmiesing: And I recognize that’s probably semantics a bit, and people would identify a whole bunch of things the university does that’s not necessarily specifically named in the roadmap, but I think for us it’s building on the strengths, right? And then where do we have gaps that we need additional expertise to advance the initiatives? Doing a comprehensive review of all of our enrollment management practices is not something that we would have the capacity to do internally. It does take an external view on some things to help us advance those priorities. So that’s an example of, we knew we didn’t have the internal capacity to do that. Having an external set of voices engaged to work on this every day is very helpful. Having external individuals help facilitate the engagement of the strategic roadmap and all of our stakeholders, help build cadence of how we do things, help build surveys and focus groups. Most institutions don’t have really deep benches in strategy offices to do all of that, right?

0:11:00.7 Julia Philyaw: Right.

0:11:02.0 Ryan Schmiesing: And wouldn’t build out that type of extensive capacity when you can partner externally to do that. So a lot of times it’s about where do we have capacity, what’s the scope of the initiative, and then there are times when having external views and inputs into the processes helps us advance the overall initiative.

0:11:27.2 Julia Philyaw: Yeah. And I appreciate, Ryan. Correct me if I’m wrong here, I think the strategic enrollment management assessment and review you all did at the university was actually the first time it was done university-wide, right? I think some of your campuses may have individually done this, but really looking at that comprehensive University of Minnesota view. And I love how you mentioned earlier each of your five campuses having a distinct value proposition within the environment in which they sit, the workforce in which they support. So, again, having that external partner that could have that more comprehensive view, I do appreciate that you brought that.

0:12:07.0 Julia Philyaw: Another thing you mentioned, just so many different moving pieces, different stakeholder groups that you’re engaging at certain points of the process, either through the strategic roadmap work that was being done or the strategic enrollment management work that’s being done, and just knowing… Another word that you used that resonated with me was cadence, like the cadence of the work getting done. There’s no shortage of great ideas on university campuses and it’s just making sure that we’re advancing the priorities. So could you touch briefly on the project management side of the projects? In other words, maybe there’s a lot of these moving pieces, lots of concurrent initiatives that were happening. And what did you feel that you needed to be able to make sure that you’re meeting the deliverables, meeting the timelines, and removing any bottlenecks that potentially were happening?

0:13:02.5 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah, it’s really important, I think, when you undertake major reviews or planning initiatives that you have some capacity around managing the project. And you can go all the way from very strict project management that is a whole methodology of doing things to some very basic tools to use to manage them. We found a lot of value in the partnership to help us stay on timelines, to understand what our deliverables are, but most importantly, I think, is there are sets of decisions throughout any initiative that have to be made. Understanding what those decisions are, understanding how they impact the future work, and then getting to those decisions is really important. And you can’t do that without some sense of a managed project, whether that’s done internally or externally. And I think for us, having that partner that helped manage all of those aspects came to us with, here are decision points.

0:14:18.6 Ryan Schmiesing: Here are major sets of information that could inform what you might choose to do next. Because throughout it is generally the institution’s decision about how you continue to move through a project, right? And you build them flexible enough to be responsive to your stakeholders, be responsive to the environment and the climate. But having schedules, having decision points, having confirmation of who the stakeholders are who have been engaged, having summaries of data and inputs, extremely helpful because, again, we don’t necessarily have the capacity to do all of that work. And then we’ve carried that over into some of our other projects where we have a project manager managing aspects of the calendar project, for example, or managing aspects of the overall strategic plan implementation.

0:15:10.4 Ryan Schmiesing: Because it’s one thing to have a plan, to have goals, have priorities, have teams, but then how do we support them to continue to make progress? All of that’s really important, but I think the most important piece is all of the information that comes along in a project, how’s it informing your next set of decisions? And as you know, when we were in the strategic roadmap development, we chose to go different directions based on what we learned and how the stakeholders engaged. Another thing is we do work on an academic calendar, and so while 12 months in a year, you don’t have 12 months to do things, right, to properly engage stakeholders, which then also influences what we could do and couldn’t do.

0:15:59.5 Julia Philyaw: Yeah. And a couple of things I want to pull out, Ryan, that you said, again, just the stakeholder engagement, the magnitude of the different projects you all were working on. You also mentioned something earlier about change, right? The leadership team at the university, recognized that there was a lot of change that was happening. And even though really positive change, change can still be a bit difficult and challenging for some folks. So any project of this size that you all were doing, and you were doing multiple concurrently, it is normal to maybe run into some challenges or maybe some stakeholder pushback, not necessarily about disagreement, but just… And maybe not fully understanding the vision or how they could see themselves in the plan, right? So would you mind sharing some of those internal challenges if you faced them and tell us how you kind of worked through them and really made sure to keep the stakeholders informed at the right points of time?

0:16:57.2 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah. So two things. Anytime you do major planning, there’s always a question of what are you trying to accomplish and what are you trying to do and what are you really looking for and what are you wanting to change, right? And I think what we have to help people understand is that’s part of why we’re doing what we’re doing. We don’t always know what might need changed, if anything. But to me, I think the discussion really should center, and where we tried to center is, is what are our strengths and where do we have opportunities to be stronger, to better serve the people of Minnesota and potential students and families and communities? But again, centering on what are the strengths of the institution and acknowledging, and I think, and saying it out loud, that the university has many strengths and what we’re trying to do is build on that. That does a couple of things. In my mind, it’s being new to the state and institution, I think that’s a… And it’s not just because of that, it’s because it’s the right thing to do.

0:18:09.0 Ryan Schmiesing: But you have to acknowledge the 175 years of success the institution has had, right?

0:18:14.7 Julia Philyaw: Oh, yeah.

0:18:17.2 Ryan Schmiesing: And acknowledge the people that are doing that work, that are here and have been here much longer than I and others. So first of all, it’s acknowledging their success, acknowledging what people have done to get the institution to where it is, but then also being real with that we face a very different future than what our past has been and helping people understand and see what some of those challenges are in the future and how if we make the right decisions today or make solid decisions today that are informed, can set us up for the future. I would say the other thing in terms of managing the change is, it is… And we’re doing this, I think, with one of our projects now, it is having people engaged in solving the problems that we’re trying to solve. It’s not just saying, here’s the change. What do you think of it? It’s, here is the direction we’re trying to move, here’s the end goal. What are the impacts of that?

0:19:28.8 Julia Philyaw: Yeah.

0:19:30.6 Ryan Schmiesing: And what are the potential solutions to overcome any obstacles that we have? So people are building this with us rather than just going in and saying, here’s the change, here’s what you have to implement, now tell me how you’re going to implement it. Maybe I’m naive, but it seems to be working well. It does take some time.

0:19:53.9 Julia Philyaw: Sure.

0:19:54.3 Ryan Schmiesing: I am convinced time on the front end builds a more sustainable solution than me or somebody else being at the finish line with nobody else. That’s not a sustainable solution.

0:20:09.3 Julia Philyaw: Yeah. Ryan, what I love about that is, the university’s really taking the time to build the muscles that are necessary for this sustained change, right?

0:20:19.1 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah.

0:20:19.2 Julia Philyaw: And it’s not just being led by your office or just being led by the President, right?

0:20:23.7 Ryan Schmiesing: Right.

0:20:24.0 Julia Philyaw: It’s really a university-wide plan and roadmap, forgive me, roadmap that’s going to take the institution forward, build on the strengths of the 175-year tradition, but also being flexible and agile to take us into the future that looks very different than where we’ve been, right? So we are going to be needing new muscles and working on those. So I really love kind of how you framed that and definitely the collective versus a singular department. So, I know we’ve only scratched the surface of the university’s Elevate Extraordinary project. EAB will also continue to watch and champion the university on, but definitely want to be respectful of your time. I know we could sit here and talk for a lot longer, but before I let you go, would you mind sharing just a brief progress report? I know you touched on some of the work that you’re already doing, and maybe just tell us some of the most important lessons that you learned along the way and maybe some other tidbits of advice that you would give to university leaders and strategists that might be contemplating a similar effort.

0:21:32.1 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah. So, the roadmap was adopted by the Board of Regents late last year, so I think December of last year. And since that time, we have 20 focus areas within our roadmap. We have teams of faculty, staff, others working to develop plans of how do we accomplish the key actions within each of those focus areas. We’ve moved forward with funding for a number of initiatives around food security, student mental health. We have enormous expertise in spatial mapping and those types of things, so we’ve moved forward with that. So, we have a number of initiatives we’ve moved forward with. We’ve launched a couple of different initiatives, and then I would anticipate, as we move into the summer and the fall, that we’ll finalize a number of the other plans to begin to launch initiatives.

0:22:33.9 Ryan Schmiesing: And I want to be careful saying that they’re all new. Some of them are building again on current strengths and capacity we have here, and to go back to the title of the roadmap is how do we elevate that work, quite honestly. So it continues to be iterative for us. I think one of the main learnings is that last word I used, which is we’ve learned or we’re reminded that we continue to have to be iterative in this work. We intentionally went back to the community and said, here, you helped us identify these priorities and these focus areas. Now help us identify how we operationalize all of this, and there’s been a ton of learning in that of how do you operationalize something for five campuses where different strengths and capacities and capabilities lie on each of the campuses? So, we’re learning about that.

0:23:34.5 Ryan Schmiesing: We are learning even more so where we have expertise that maybe we didn’t even know about, but as teams have come together, more things have emerged that are strengths of the institution. But what I would say most of all, as we’ve worked through the plan as a whole and all of the initiatives in it, is no focus area for us or action team, there is no cookie-cutter way of how we do it. There’s probably 20 different ways we’re doing things in there. They’re in different spots. We have established expertise in some areas, we have budding expertise in others. So just acknowledging that regardless if you have three goals or 20, they’re gonna be operationalized and implemented differently. And I think that’s okay, but that does take another set of attention to detail to make sure that we continue to move all things forward at the same time.

0:24:41.1 Julia Philyaw: Yeah, a lesson that I learned from listening to you, working so closely with you over the last year, is that truly the commitment of the university for this strategic roadmap to truly be a living document.

0:24:54.7 Ryan Schmiesing: Yeah.

0:24:55.1 Julia Philyaw: Not a check that we needed to do for accreditation or because the Board of Regents told us to create a plan. You all really took this as an opportunity to say, what is our roadmap for the next one, three, five, 10, 20 years? And really leaning into it being a living document that is iterative, that is reviewed, that is assessed. So just really want to thank you for that learning. Ryan, thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

0:25:24.9 Ryan Schmiesing: Thank you. It’s been great. It’s been great to reflect on our progress and processes that we continue to work on.

0:25:32.5 Julia Philyaw: Yeah, for sure. Thanks.

0:25:33.9 Ryan Schmiesing: Thank you. I appreciate it.

0:25:34.2 Julia Philyaw: All right. Colleagues, we’ll talk to you soon.

0:25:36.1 Ryan Schmiesing: Thank you.