Operational Excellence: Visible or Not?

As I’ve continued reviewing marketing and communications organizational charts, I’ve benefitted from this work overlapping with the conclusion of our latest strategic planning research. (I’m pleased that this strategic planning research, first launched in 2020, is continuing now as a collaboration between SIG (Strata Information Group) and Navigate Gray.) I’m now at 75 org charts and still accepting more, so please feel free to share yours (and thank you for feeding my org chart obsession). Another pattern has surfaced as I’ve layered these two bodies of work together.

Operational excellence is increasingly prominent in strategic plans as an overarching priority. Across plans, it shows up in priorities or commitments such as:

• Achieve operational excellence and responsible stewardship to support our mission

• Advance a sustainable, adaptable, and operationally efficient institution

• Enhance operational excellence across the institution

• Improve operational effectiveness and efficiencies

These priorities often cascade broadly, touching financial management, talent, systems, and institutional capacity.

Less visible in marcomm structures

What’s striking, however, is that within marketing and communications, this priority is often not visible in organizational structure.

As I shared recently in Inside Higher Ed, an org chart offers an incomplete picture of how work actually gets done. Still, it remains a revealing artifact, especially when viewed alongside stated strategy.

Across many marcomm org charts, structure continues to emphasize a functional orientation. Those capabilities are essential. But they do not, on their own, signal ownership for learning, insight, feedback, or effectiveness in relation to broader institutional outcomes.

To be clear, I’m not proposing that every marcomm unit should have a Director of Operational or Organizational Excellence (though it can be useful to map the responsibilities associated with such a role to where that work currently happens in the organization). Rather, this is an observation about capability visibility. 

In many cases, the work associated with effectiveness exists implicitly, embedded in individual leaders, informal processes, ad hoc reporting, or more episodic assessment. The capability is present but not explicitly designed or structurally legible.

A broader design tension

It’s unlikely this pattern is unique to marketing and communications. The same tension likely exists in admissions, advancement, student affairs, and other units that are asked to align to operational excellence without always a clear structural signal of how that alignment is supported.

This isn’t a critique of the areas across an institution (whether that’s HR or IT) that provide leadership or support for operational excellence. Rather, it highlights the broader challenge of making cross-functional capabilities visible and integrated across the institution.

Strategic plans reflect what institutions aspire to become. Org charts reveal – at least in part – how intentionally those aspirations are translated into organizational practice.

When operational excellence is elevated as a strategic priority but remains structurally invisible, it points to a core organization design question – not about adding roles, but about aligning capabilities with strategy.

This pattern is one of several emerging as the research continues and is worth examining more closely.