Transition management for a medical school
To successfully manage its transition to a new building, the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences engaged us to help stakeholders express their perceptions and concerns about the move, understand everyday life in the new environment, and anticipate the positive changes to come.
The building was designed to accommodate a 25% enrollment increase and house all eight of the university’s medical, health sciences, and basic sciences programs in interprofessional learning communities. This presented a rare opportunity to pursue novel ways of teaching, learning, and conducting research, but it also posed a paradigm shift: Students, faculty, staff, and researchers from formerly “siloed” programs would be sharing classrooms, labs, and support spaces.
We launched the process by working with stakeholders to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats they perceived in relation to the new building. An interactive workshop guided our initial framework development and provided essential perspective for future communications, meetings, and events.
Then we dug deeper to conduct a gap analysis. Working with selected participants, we helped identify primary focus areas like student culture, research, staff space, and the overarching educational model. The group described the current states and the desired future states of each focus area, along with potential challenges to achieving those future states in the new building. Goals included promoting communication and collaboration, integrating technology to transform the curriculum, and creating cross-disciplinary learning groups.
Major concerns emerged about sharing space and equipment in the new classrooms, labs, and support spaces. For instance, the new building would have four types of classrooms: learning halls, high-tech classrooms, low-tech classrooms, and rooms for small group learning. Teaching faculty and staff were concerned that they would be unable to reserve the appropriate space types for their classes, particularly in light of accreditation requirements. Together we developed a sharing model for classrooms that involved identifying primary space users and prioritizing them during scheduling. We created similar models for labs and support spaces.
We also developed a brand identity and a communications strategy to guide the change management process through the move into the new building. Working closely with stakeholders, we identified value propositions, orientation information, FAQs, and more, and we developed key messages and strategies that would successfully communicate those messages to the campus community via town halls, newsletters, and informal communications. At the micro scale, “day in the life” workshops for each stakeholder group conveyed new ways of learning, working, and researching in the new building.
The “Coming Together” communications campaign created buy-in, built trust, and maximized productivity by alleviating concerns and allowing students, researchers, faculty, and staff to focus on their work before, during, and after the move. The new facility’s open environment encourages the university to approach medical and health sciences education in new ways. Survey feedback reflects participants’ satisfaction: Researchers report being happy with the open labs and informal collaboration. Departments have a greater variety of space types to use, and different classroom types have resulted in more efficient teaching schedules.
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