Development of a decision­making method to form the indicators for a university development plan

The problems of decision-making support in the course of designing a university development plan have been studied. This is important because modern tendencies in the development of higher educational institution are constantly changing and getting more complicated. Organization management under modern conditions is becoming adaptive, proactive, strategic, requiring a revision of management tools. The basis of strategic planning is indicative planning, which in turn is a form that solves the problem of imperfect information through the indicators that describe an object, a process, or a phenomenon. Effective management of the activity of a higher educational institution in the framework of planning includes the forms and the methods for creating a system of indicators that reflect the picture of the organization state.The process of the development of a university development plan faces the problem of selecting and ranking the indicators of the development of a higher educational institution, covers both tangible and intangible sides and is a multi-criterion problem of decision making. To solve this problem, it is necessary to select a method for decision making support to form the system of indicative indicators. Evaluation of indicative indicators are carried out through the construction of a cognitive map, a priori ranking and the hierarchy analysis method, involving experts from the field of higher education management. The results obtained are compared taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of the selected methods. The decision made on the choice of the method for the formation of indicators implies the joint use of the hierarchy analysis method and the construction of a cognitive map. During the hybrid application of the methods, the mutual influence of the indicators and the compliance of the indicators with directions of the university development should be taken into account. It is not worthwhile applying a priori ranking in order to form an indicator because there are no data on the joint influence of several studied indicators on each other.The results of the study are aimed at simplifying the decision-making process in planning: consideration of bottlenecks when designing a development plan, improvement of operation and learning quality, effective use of tangible and intangible resources.