Episode 8: Year End: Strategic Plan Update

Discover the progress URMIA staff and volunteers have made on URMIA’s strategic plan and see what to look forward to in 2020. Host Jenny Whittington chats with Colorado Robertson, associate director of risk management at Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College (LSU), who was appointed to lead the Presidential Task Force charged with creating the shared online tool for tracking progress on strategic plan initiatives.

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Transcript

Jenny: Hello everyone this is Jenny Whittington, executive director of URMIA, and welcome to URMIA Matters. Today we have a wonderful guest Colorado Robertson from LSU and Colorado is going to speak to us today a little bit about our strategic plan. But first I want to give a little bit of background so Colorado tell me a little bit about yourself how you got involved in Risk Management in your involvement with URMIA. 
 
 Colorado: yeah Jenny, well first of all it's very exciting to be here on the URMIA Matters podcast. How exciting that we actually have a podcast for the URMIA organization and we're reaching out to our members this way so welcome everybody who's listening today. This has been a long time coming it's very exciting that we're now in episode 8, I believe.

Jenny: Indeed.
 
 Colorado: So that’s very exciting. Whenever I started in URMIA a long time ago we didn’t have any type of technology. 

Jenny: You are young man, Colorado.
 
 Colorado: Only been around in risk management about 10 years. I graduated in public administration and as part of my Master's I looked into Enterprise risk management and developed a program for LSU to adopt. And ultimately risk management hooks you and then you never really get out of it. I think I’ve heard that from my various colleagues in the URMIA organization so that's similarly what happened to me so I started working on it in my Master's classes and then ultimately University hired me as the University’s first risk analyst. Prior to that we just had insurance claims coordinators so I have an opportunity to work for LSU as a risk analyst and now I'm the associate director of risk management and we have an autonomous program from our state risk management and really a true risk management office. And URMIA has been very valuable on that journey because ultimately again we used to just process insurance claims but now we have a full-fledged risk management department that is going on about five years now and we’ve really drawn a lot of information from the colleagues in the networks that we have through the URMIA community and from the rich knowledge-base that the URMIA Network provides. 

Jenny: Excellent. Why don’t you tell me about what was your first experience with URMIA and how you got – you’ve been very involved in the annual conference newcomer session for a number of years- just talk about how you got involved with URMIA. 

Colorado: Yes, I've been involved with URMIA. Ann Whitmire from North Dakota recruited me to be on the membership committee after my first annual conference in Portland, Oregon, so again the people are what's really a great part of the organization. Portland was first conference so Steve Holland led the risk management 101. so Steve definitely be doing that presentation encouraged us to get on membership- get on a committee – and ultimately I found Ann after the conference and she recruited me onto the membership committee and I've been part of that for several years now. But it's about being active and not only receiving the resources URMIA has to offer but it’s been great to be involved in the URMIA and help produce and be a part of the programming and everything that comes back in which we talking about the strategic plan later today and really I had an opportunity to begin my membership needs assessment along with Melissa and Stacie Kroll, and that's kind of how the strategic plan really got started. It was the basis for our member needs and being able to look and see what I remember is really needed and podcasts is one of those that kept coming up and it's great to see it really come to fruition.
 
 

Jenny:  Yeah absolutely, and Colorado has really been an advocate for getting the podcast up and going so thanks for that. So just talking about the Strategic plan… I mean I've been with URMIA since 2005 and when I first got here we had - the board had a strategic plan and back in those days we were pretty regimented that we would we would update it every 3 years which we’ve done overtime but this strategic plan, that we're going to talk about today is pretty unique. We did that comprehensive needs assessment in 2018 and we got a lot of great feedback from the members and our current president Chauncey Fagler had asked a few members to be part of a presidential task force so Colorado Robertson and Sam Florio and Marje Lemmon are all part of the presidential task force. And Colorado had a big job as part of the presidential task force to create what we're calling our “strategic goals dashboard”. So we can talk a little bit about that today and just the goals for the organization and all the URMIA members please know that this plan was really a direct action from the feedback we got in the needs assessment and how the board took that feedback and put it into three categories of goals. So Colorado let's just start with strategic goal one: Enhance URMIA’s educational and resource toolkit. Can you speak to that one a little bit? 
 
 Colorado: Yeah. That’s great. Just kinda echo what you said Jenny. This really has been feedback and this a lot of work that’s been going into this. That dozens of people are working on these strategic goals. And Luke spent a lot of time really defining them and getting them to a place where we can direct them. So the first one is to enhance- what we did was we have 3 ultimate - like Jenny you said – 3 major goals for the strategic goals Enhance URMIA’s educational resource toolkit. Strategic goal 2 is the Foster opportunities for networking and connection amongst members and strategic goal 3 is to improve URMIA is office infrastructure to better serve the members needs.
 
 And below each of those we have those objectives that we've developed the one of the ones with in the strategic goal one just to explore in evaluate potential use of podcast and app technology as a potential medium for education. Which is our first accomplished objective for the year. Shout out to Michelle and Jenny and the office staff and all the guests that have joined Jenny thus far. The second objective we have is to refresh the education plan in connected with the core competencies models and if you have not checked out either one of those resources the core competencies models is a great resource which will be linked in the show notes it's really great information out there however are we just want to kind of tie that back for the education plan and be able to convey that to the members. Another objective in strategic goal one is to refresh and republish the resource guide now which is another great information is on the URMIA website that again will be as a link in the show notes. Another objective is to develop a plan to keep the risk inventory relevant and useful and if you're not aware of the risk inventory that's in the URMIA library and Lou and his a task force have been doing a great work on getting that updated and we'll be having some refresh is coming around soon.

Jenny: Yeah, and let me just chime in on that one- sorry Colorado. We did get the early recommendation on the risk inventory at the board meeting earlier this week so definitely the members should watch for some quick improvements on that one and a future podcast episode featuring the risk inventory and how folks are using it as examples. So I'm sorry just go ahead with item number four.

Colorado: No, that’s great. And we’ve used it here for LSU and like I said that we've been developing risk management. It’s a great resource if you haven't already accessed the risk inventory and it looks like it’s only gonna get better.

Improve the structure around engaging Affiliate organizations and connection to the education plan. Affiliates are important part of the URMIA organization we appreciate all the things that they do and the affiliate committee is doing a great job in being able to engage other Affiliates, continue to build those Partnerships and relationships between both our affiliate and institutional members. 

Jenny: Yeah, and let me just chime in a little bit on that one too. I’m the staff person on the affiliates committee and we are working to produce an affiliate directory. The board did approve that so it will feature the products and services of our affiliate members that should be a value-add to all of our institutional members so really proud of that effort and then the Affiliates are doing a couple other big projects going forward so look for some great things from the Affiliates group as well 

Colorado: Great, thanks Jenny. Moving on to strategic goal number two is to foster opportunities for networking and connection amongst members. Which time and time again comes back as one of the biggest benefits of the URMIA organization. And that’s developing a network. The objective for strategic goal two is to develop a formal plan for sustaining ongoing member engagement, to create a formal structure for the engagement of partner organizations, which we developed a lot of great Partnerships and those are really contributing to the URMIA community and network. 

Jenny: Yes, definitely. Let me speak to each of those just a tiny bit. So when we talked about making a formal plan for sustaining ongoing member engagement the URMIA network is pretty much all of our online resources, including the online community that we used to refer to as the listserv and its many people still do. Our online community is a little bit more robust than that has more bells and whistles and we've really been tracking and really trying to make sure that every single message that has a question does get a response either from members at-large, a group of Champions as we defined, or Lou, our resource manager on staff will definitely make sure that every person gets a response and just give a little shout-out for Lou, I mean the Ask Lou button is on every single URMIA web page and he is a great resource in knows every single thing about our library.

Colorado: She’s not exaggerating. 
 
 Jenny: Yeah, take advantage of Lou, he's a wonderful resource. And then the partner organizations that URMIA has great relationships with RIMS and with NACUBO and Prima. This next year we're looking at that we're going to partner with a ACCED-I, those of the event managers on campus. and they are big users of our TULIP program. So the membership should look for more information about our TULIP program. If you're not using our third party liability policy please look into it it's on the website under insurance and does a great resource and it provides revenue to URMIA so we can keep your dues payments low so please take advantage of that. And Colorado go ahead with number 3.
 
 Colorado: Okay Jenny, and our last goal is – you’ve kinda already mentioned it – but is to Improve the URMIA office infrastructure to better serve the member needs. Again we're all about members that's really what the whole strategic plan is about is improving the URMIA Organization for our members. As you kinda touched on, the first objective is to improve the website functionality is there anything else you wanted to add?
 
 Jenny: Yeah, I wanted to speak a little bit about the couple of the task forces that Lou has been managing first being in the library. So he has a task force that has had quite a quite a task I think there they've been responsible for reviewing I don't know somewhere between 60 and 100 documents trying to make sure that they're valuable and only keeping things in the library that are the best resources and making sure they're the most current resources. So they are not quite done cuz it's been pretty big task I'm not sure how many documents we have in the library I think it's around 7,000 documents so it's a lot of work for a task force even though I think we have 10 or 12 people doing it it's a pretty pretty big task but the result of it will be that we have the strongest resources in the library and that when you do the search function that they will come up first. Then just a little shout out to all the members out there that who have great resources great Tools, great checklists, for a documents that they reference often please share those with Lou. Send this to Lou and we will get them added to the library because if it's benefiting you on your campus it will benefit other members on their campus as well. We already talked a little bit about the resource guide that's another task force that Lou has been overseeing and look for great things there. They're getting close to wrapping up their work on the resource guide but this is a resource we shared I think in the early like 2012/2013 and was really targeted for new folks to the higher education risk management community so we are looking to strengthen that because we know that is a big part of our membership and Colorado you know that well because you do the newcomer session I mean at our conference we usually have about a third of new member first timer type attendees and they are very hungry for that resource and that's something we heard loud and clear in the needs assessment that we need to provide 24/7 access to those materials. So these are some of the ways that we are improving the office infrastructure to better serve our members needs and take it away with the rest of the objectives. 
 
 Colorado: Okay, and the final two objectives under our strategic goal number 3 is Ensure an onboarding process for new staff effectively Drives their engagement and a related objective is to improve the onboarding experience Recruitment and Retention of members.

Jenny: Yeah, let me speak just a tiny bit to each of those. So we had a board meeting earlier this week in December and we did get approval to add a full-time education manager to URMIA and this is going to be a huge huge benefit to the membership in the future years. We have really grown and staff since I've been here in 2005 and having an full time education person to kind of manage the whole education at our program and kind of take us to the next level I mean really it's in result to the needs assessment and we will also be adding a part-time reired with manager as well to take over the the great work that Christine Eick has done and then the onboarding for members on this is something that Joelle Markham and Louise Schlessinger in our office have been working on, is we really want to make sure that every new person to earn Mia does feel welcome they know how to use our resources and we're making you know small improvements to our website all the time so if you haven't checked out our home lately it looks aesthetically pretty much the same but we've at we've changed all the documents and all the resources that you can get to from the homepage so I would really ask the members to book mark our home page and check it out cuz it really does have a lot of useful information and it's fresh so please check that out.

Colorado: And I will definitely echo that. I’m on URMIA’s website just about everyday or every other day. Jenny this work doesn't get done by itself the national staff has been doing a great job and implementing and helping get these strategic objectives in progressing as well as a variety of task force that's what we kind of changed to organizational volunteer structure around so the Committees and all 10 task force have been doing a great job if members wanted to sign up or maybe still jump on one of these task force is that something they can reach out to Joell about it and just let them know that that they would like to get on task force.
 
 Jenny: Absolutely, Joelle Marcum is our membership coordinator. Reach out to her and tell her what you're interested in doing and we can check with the various leaders of the task forces and see who need some help but I will tell you they all will need help over the next year so please do you send that message to Joelle.
 
 Colorado: Yeah, and it’s great to hear from both Chauncey and Courtney,  our president-elect that the Strategic plan is not static that it is a moving document that were always making progress on it in there already thinking about what's next and Chauncey urged me to let everyone know that all of our members should be thinking about what's next we want to make continuous improvements as early as leadership and continue to benefit the members and just think of this is a roadmap and we will continue our journey and the Strategic plan is definitely in place and we're making great progress toward it and it's just great to know that all the members have opportunities contribute to it and the board I think really has responded and then the staff has stepped up and it's done a great job thus far and look forward to continuing seeing some of these things that you're going to be rolling out over the next couple months too.
 
 Jenny: Absolutely. well Colorado thanks very much for being my guest today. I believe this will be a wrap of URMIA Matters until next time.