Enhance your approach to strategy, processes and change
Change is a constant in education, and so is the need for improvement.
To continue serving your students and community to the fullest, you need an effective strategic plan. But finding the time and specialized knowledge to support your planning can be difficult when your institution is already facing the next statute, regulation or initiative.
Wipfli’s education strategy consulting and operations team can help you develop an effective strategic plan and improve processes while supporting your staff through critical changes.
Why Wipfli?
Wipfli is equipped with the education-specific experience needed to help you achieve the outcomes you want. Our team includes former educational institution professionals, meaning we understand your unique planning requirements and the impact you want to make on your students and community.
Let us help you improve your strategy and operations with our comprehensive services.
Strategy
Wipfli’s strategy team can help you develop a school improvement plan that’s more than just paper. We provide valuable insight and practical guidance into how you can address the challenges preventing you from fully serving your students and communities.
Wipfli’s team of facilitators brings our educational institution experience and promising practices to help you create a flexible, effective strategic plan.
Our services adjust to the level of support you need, with multiple options:
- Transactional planning: We provide you with a basic template that helps you allocate resources effectively, improve student outcomes and improve or sustain performance. Our services can help you plan for districts or individual institutions, with templates for five-, three- and one-year plans.
- Forecasted transformational planning: We take a data-based approach to analyzing the current state of your institution and comparing it to your objectives, helping you identify the opportunities you have to improve, from updating your infrastructure to changing your administrative processes.
As part of our services, we can also help you expand your strategy planning to include the services you want to provide your community and the partnerships you want to build with outside services.
To assist in your strategic planning and wraparound care initiatives, we can help you facilitate:
- Human-centered design discussions.
- Custom survey administration.
- Community needs assessments.
Wipfli’s strategy services follow your institution throughout your improvement journey, helping to implement your plan and key changes with support for:
- Enacting change: We build change resiliency into our strategic planning support, working alongside your staff to manage changes associated with your plan and enable continuous quality improvement.
- Evaluating consequences: We help you assess the explicit and potential consequences of your plan, helping you address equity issues and unintended effects.
Wipfli’s digital advisory team uses holistic ideation and planning to help your institution see the technology transformation you need. We work closely with your team to understand your goals and accelerate your progress with an effective technology strategy.
We help you use technology to help you improve outcomes through four essential components:
- Idea journey: Through collaborative conversations, such as design thinking workshops, our advisors help you use human-centered planning to envision technology from the standpoint of student outcomes and how you can build a better educational institution.
- Technology innovation road map: Our team takes a deep dive into your process and goals so that we can help you develop a plan for how you can maximize the potential of your solutions, including administrative and educational technology.
- CIO advisory: Our outsourced CIO services can provide your organization with high-level digital strategy support. We also tailor our range of services to your needs, including situation-specific guidance or coaching for your existing CIO.
- Program management: Wipfli specializes in helping orchestrate multiple technology initiatives. We work closely with your staff to assess existing project management processes and provide recommendations for improvements.
Operations
Wipfli has deep experience guiding educational institutions through process improvements, new initiatives and system changes.
We understand the challenges institutions face in completing initiatives, and we offer flexible support that works with your academic year or budget cycle. We can also help you manage change effectively, providing you with the methodology and skills needed to build change resiliency in your staff.
Wipfli’s process improvement services can help you allocate resources effectively and improve your processes. We work with your team to identify issues, create a defined plan and support your people through changes.
Our services include:
- Administrative process improvement: We help you map your current administrative processes, identify opportunities for improvement, define your vision of where you want your processes to be and create an action plan for getting there. We also help you identify ways to use your administrative resources more efficiently.
- Automation: Wipfli helps you identify opportunities for automation so that you can start doing more with limited resources or staff. Our team supports you through all stages of automation, including establishing requirements, development and testing to help you automate in a way that drives the outcomes you want.
- Documentation: Our team works closely with your staff to gather in-depth details about how your institution works, helping you review, document and ultimately transform your administrative processes.
Wipfli can help your institution choose the right software to better serve your students and staff.
We seek to understand the needs of your institution as deeply as you do, carefully evaluating potential solutions to choose the ones that will provide you with the greatest impact. From updating your administrative solutions to adopting a new learning management system, our team can support you at any stage of the software selection process, including:
- Requirements-gathering workshops.
- Demonstrations and vendor presentations.
- Provider due diligence.
- Statement of work review and execution.
Wipfli can help you build a more change-resilient organization with support for all levels of your staff, from board members and administrators to teachers. We help your people adopt effective change skills by:
- Providing a proven change management framework.
- Training your staff on implementation.
- Providing ongoing coaching for staff across your institution.
We also offer change management services to support your institution during a major software implementation, reorganization or procedural or cultural shift. We’re ready to help your organization:
- Navigate complex cultural issues and resistance during change to minimize disruption.
- Keep staff engaged and create proactive communication plans so that you can effectively communicate and implement new processes, solutions and procedures.
- Enable a smooth technology transition by helping you build a strategy that provides effective training, addresses resistance and communicates effectively about changes and benefits.
Wipfli’s project management team is ready to help you achieve better outcomes from your investments. We provide support in all areas of project implementation, including:
- Communication.
- Critical tasks and task prioritization.
- Budgeting.
- Alignment.
We work at the intersection of your institution and software vendors, helping you identify the processes, data and decision points crucial to your digital success. We also offer our education-focused guidance around promising practices and system design.
Our team
Marcie Bomberg-Montoya, OCI, OEI
Marcie Bomberg-Montoya brings over 25 years of experience in executive leadership roles in both financial institutions and private enterprise to her engagements. She has developed a high level of proficiency, leading a myriad of complex enterprise-wide endeavors such as mergers and acquisitions, strategic analysis and plan implementation, growth and transformation strategies, as well as innovative product and service development.
Daniel Bashore, Ph.D.
Daniel Bashore is an organizational performance consultant on Wipfli’s change management team. With a strong background in organizational development principles, he works closely with clients to understand their needs and develop solutions to help them successfully implement change within their teams and organizations. Daniel is passionate about helping organizations use data and theory-driven insights to improve performance, redesign processes and drive team engagement.
Deron J. Kling
Deron Kling is an experienced consultant and leader focused on helping Wipfli’s clients plan for the future and reach their goals. His background includes over 20 years as an organizational leader and management consultant.
Theron Kelso, PMP
Theron Kelso is a manager with over 25 years of experience in serving a variety of industries including aerospace, public safety and nonprofits. He is a digital transformation leader, recognizing the power of technology to advance each organization’s goals and executing on technology roadmaps that rally organizations to deliver results. Theron gains a clear vision of business and technology strategy through exploration and high-touch engagement with clients.
Courtney P Kohler
Courtney P. Kohler is a consultant in Wipfli’s nonprofit and government practice. She has worked directly with vulnerable populations, as well as at the state and national levels, to develop and deliver training programs, build organizational capacity, facilitate transition and planning processes, and identify best practices.
