What Is the 25% Plan?
In higher education, leaders face growing demands and constrained staffing levels, yet their teams are stretched to capacity. Teams are managing outdated systems, customizations, and juggling manual processes that lack efficiency. When teams reach capacity, it’s critical for leaders to find ways to address workload pressures and focus on the campus priorities that matter most.
Enter the 25% Plan: a simple yet impactful exercise to help teams identify and reduce their least valuable work in order to regain 25% of their time for new priorities. Thinking in terms of a full quarter of total available time can spark meaningful discussions about long-term planning and how teams can work more effectively to meet priorities. With budget cuts, staffing freezes, and other challenges looming, the 25% Plan offers a practical framework to help institutions build capacity and prepare for a more sustainable future.
In this post, we’ll explore how this approach works and why it’s a tool every leader should consider.
How Does Your Team Spend Its Time?
To identify opportunities to increase efficiency, begin by uncovering the least valuable 25% of how your team spends its time. Ask questions that help differentiate essential duties from activities that add little value. It’s critical to communicate the purpose of this exercise clearly with your team: this is not about downsizing or layoffs. This is about taking action to empower your team to work on impactful, meaningful projects. Involving teams in identifying low-value work that can be addressed is empowering and should become a regular practice.
Some questions to get you started may include:
- What work is least critical to the university’s mission?
- What work doesn’t align clearly with the mission?
- What tasks could stop based on low demand or outdated relevance?
- Which activities are manual, exception-driven, or one-off?
- What tasks feel like a poor use of time, could be done more efficiently, or don’t align with job descriptions?
- What work should be done by someone else?
Teams can use tools like service lists, annual business cycle calendars, ticketing system reports, or position descriptions to identify activities that fall into the bottom quartile. Start with broad categories and refine as needed. For efficiency, this step can be done as pre-work for a team discussion to review and adjust the list collaboratively.
Estimate Time Allocation
Each team member should identify their least valuable activities and estimate the percentage of time spent on each activity. This step doesn’t need to be precise—rough percentages are enough to clarify the effort tied to lower-value tasks. Consider creating a spreadsheet for each team member with these columns to get a complete picture of your current state:
- What is the description of the service or task (open ended)?
- What percentage of time is spent on this task by the team member?
- What value do these services or tasks add (high, medium, low)?
- How efficient would your team rate these services (efficient, medium, inefficient)?
- What is the strength of alignment between tasks and primary job responsibilities (strong, medium, weak)?
- Could any tasks be completed in a different way (open ended)? Discontinued? Resourced differently?
By concentrating on the bottom quartile, your team can quickly surface opportunities to free up capacity for higher-priority work while avoiding the burden of cataloging every activity. This focused approach ensures meaningful results with less effort.
The next step is to meet with each team to review team member responses. Encourage team conversation on actionable tasks and potential themes, which helps ensure buy-in and a shared understanding of priorities. Start with building consensus on low-value tasks that could be discontinued or outsourced. Then move on to higher value tasks that could be improved with simplification, streamlining, and automation. This step helps prioritize efforts to maximize team capacity while maintaining essential services.
Consider grouping tasks by themes. These themes may include:
- Discontinue
- Outsource
- Simplify and streamline
- Automate
You will undoubtedly discover that some tasks are symptoms of cross-team and other organizational issues that need to be addressed. Reserve these for addressing with your leadership team or at a higher level. Consider which decision-makers you can work with to improve the underlying issues that are resulting in inefficient, low-value tasks.
Gather responses across multiple teams to create a full picture of potential actions. Review the tasks identified for discontinuation or efficiency improvements. Explore options such as artificial intelligence or alternative sourcing to handle routine activities. From this list of options, prioritize the best opportunities to pursue, ensuring they align with your team’s capacity goals. Aim to get your teams some quick wins that will create meaningful change—this will help keep team morale high through the change management process.
Engage leadership and key stakeholders at this stage to validate your ranking of high- and low-value work, prioritize inefficiency improvements, and secure support for implementation plans. At the same time, continue to involve your team in brainstorming the best ways of meeting the evolving needs of your institution.
A Virtuous Cycle
The 25% Plan allows teams to manage capacity to rebuild institutional resilience. By engaging in regular internal management of services and workload, you create opportunities to proactively plan for and address capacity challenges to maintain resiliency. A proactive, resilient team culture helps employees feel heard and encourages creative thinking about ways to continually improve services and workload.
Meet Your Challenges Head-On
Higher education is at a critical crossroads. With increasing uncertainty, workloads must be proactively evaluated to avoid reactionary decision-making. Now is the time to create the capacity not only to meet upcoming challenges but to build a stronger, more sustainable future.
This post was authored by Senior Principal and Associate Partner Cathy Bates, who works directly with IT and institutional leaders on large, mission-focused projects including strategic planning, organizational assessments, data governance and IT governance.