Ask the 5 W’s Before You Build

Use these questions to guide early conversations:

• Who matters? Identify the stakeholders, decision‑makers, and data stewards who will own and maintain your LM configuration.
• What is the mission? Clarify the goals for LM (e.g., tenure transparency, appointment tracking, workforce planning).
• When does data move? Understand key calendar dates: hiring cycles, contract cycles, review periods, and promotion windows.
• Where does data live? Confirm systems of record (HR, ERP, FAR) and how LM will connect to them.
• Why are you implementing LM now? Align expectations on the value LM should deliver.

Lay the Groundwork

As part of your governance foundation, consider:

• Governance framework: Define the policies and standards that will guide how faculty pathways are represented in LM.
• Roles & responsibilities: Decide who can propose changes, who approves them, and who implements them.
• Data quality: Commit to processes that maintain accurate, complete, and consistent data.
• Privacy & security: Ensure configurations respect institutional policies and applicable regulations.

Establish Governance Committees

Many institutions find it helpful to formalize governance through committees:

• Steering Committee: Senior leaders (e.g., provost, deans) who set direction, approve major decisions, and remove roadblocks.
• Operational Experts: Representatives from colleges/schools who understand both internal processes and LM. They translate policy into configuration and support end‑users.
• Technical Support: IT or systems staff who manage integrations, data flows, and technical troubleshooting.

Once governance is in place and agreed upon across stakeholders, you are ready to interpret your faculty handbook through the lens of LM.

As you review the handbook, document how each policy area aligns to a specific LM component:

• Series: Groups faculty ranks within a broader position category and defines the overall pathway. Series are typically derived from sections of the handbook that describe track or pathway types (e.g., tenure-track, clinical, research). Series provide the structural “home” for ranks, events, and professional journeys. 
  

  A series serves solely as a grouping of ranks within an institution's organizational structure and does not define the criteria for moving between ranks, unlike the Academic/Professional Journey.

   
• Faculty Ranks: Formal academic titles (e.g. Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor) defined in policy become ranks within each series. Modifiers (e.g., Adjunct, Emeritus, Clinical) can be included in rank naming conventions.
  

  Once selected, ranks can be reordered sequentially to create connections that define the progression of a faculty member’s professional journey through upcoming events.

   
• Events: Required reviews, evaluations, and promotion milestones translate into LM events (e.g. Annual Review, Third-Year Review, Tenure Review, Promotion to Full Professor, Post-Tenure Review).
  

  In addition to the standard milestones described in your handbook, consider unplanned or exception events, such as sabbaticals, leaves, or tenure‑clock adjustments, that may impact an individual faculty member’s progression. These may later be represented in LM as individual or exception events.

   
• Professional Journeys: The full sequence of ranks and events described in progression or promotion policies becomes the professional journey (e.g., Assistant → Associate → Professor).
• Workload Models: Standard distribution of responsibilities (e.g. teaching, research, service, and administration) for a given context. Use them to reflect handbook language around workload expectations (e.g. clinical faculty: 70% clinical duties, 20% teaching, 10% service)
• Appointments: Link individual faculty to a specific series, rank, and workload model for a defined period.

This combined interpretation‑and‑mapping step ensures that the LM model you build is directly grounded in institutional policy and designed for consistency across units and roles.

Once you have mapped handbook concepts to LM components, review your proposed model with your governance groups:

• Steering Committee: Confirms that the mapped pathways align with institutional policy and strategy.
• Operational Experts: Check that the configuration matches real‑world practice and unit‑level nuances.
• Technical Support: Verifies that the model works with existing integrations and data structures.