58 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS in Bret’s office completed the exercise, almost every policy or practice relating to non-tenure track faculty was found to be absent in the College and subsequently scored as a 3 by everyone. This revelation helped pinpoint an area that needed to be addressed. Using the Assessment Data With the internal survey of office responsibilities and assessment of policies and practices in hand, you have insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your office’s current organization. Your strengths are identified by the 1’s on the Standards of Prac- tice survey. You probably see sections in which your college does well. Similarly, you might have a high level of responsibility in many functional areas from Appendix B and have people spending a lot of their effort on those areas. You should also have areas of strength in service iden- tified through the survey of department chairs, faculty, and staff mentioned earlier in this chapter. Congratulations! Deans don’t often have time to think about the positive aspects of their adminis- tration. Hold onto this moment for as long as you can! Then consider the weaknesses you uncovered. These come in three common forms: lack of appropriate policy or procedures, insuf- ficient effort in some (or many) areas of responsibility, and inadequate adherence to policy or procedures. The lack of policy or procedures (3’s on the Standards of Practice combined scores) should be relatively straightforward to resolve. Prioritizing the development of poli- cies, working through several of them each semester with a college shared-governance committee until they have been created could be a 3-year to 4-year process, but is not overly complex. Once new policies are in place, however, unless someone makes others aware of them and supports their implementation, you will only change your Standards of Practice score to a 2 as the policy may not be well know or followed. The other two forms of weaknesses are most often due to insufficient staffing in the dean’s office. Insufficient effort is where you identified responsibilities in your office that are underserved by staff time. Inadequate adherence to policy is generally seen as 2’s on the combined scores of your Standards of Practice. The earlier example from Bret’s office was with respect to non-tenure track faculty, and leading and managing international programs was another found in his office. Such gaps might result from a shortage of staff time as there is only so much effort than can be crammed into a work week. If you need to add effort onto some activities, you can reassign someone’s time al- location to that effort, but of course it stands to reason that they will have to do other [Weaknesses] come in three common forms: lack of appropriate policy or procedures, insufficient effort in some (or many) areas of responsibility, and inadequate adherence to policy or procedures.