Sustainability Scorecard SU specifically gained support for implementing the STARS model by doing two things. The first was that the sustainability office contacted the top administrators before applying to be a pilot site. This step is important to initiating organizational change, but does not constitute best management practice. For any initiative to succeed, senior management buy-in is essential, but so is their vocal support (Mackenzie, n.d). The rest of the organization sees senior management commitment as a sign of an initiative's perceived worth to the organization. The sustainability department at SU received permission from senior management but the initiative did not have a senior management champion. This manifested in problems downstream, such as the lack of serious support from members of the faculty.

The second thing that SU did to gain support was to send e-mails to mid-level administrators to gain their support for the project. This was not good business practice. Email is an impersonal method of communication. While the concepts may be sufficiently complex as to warrant a text document, email is often unread, skimmed over or otherwise ignored. The sustainability office needed to conduct more personal outreach to the mid-level administrators in order to truly gain their support for the STARS initiative.

2. The most significant challenge that SU faced when implementing the STARS model was communicating the definitions of the terms, in particular...

Many faculty members and others in the university did not truly understand the concepts and definitions, and were therefore unable to perform any kind of accurate self-assessment of their sustainability initiatives. The balanced scorecard methodology, had it been used more effectively, could have addressed this issue. Each element of the scorecard is evaluated against objectives (BalancedScorecard.org, 2011). This would have provided a framework for faculty members to determine, for example, precisely what sustainability in their research work or teaching courses actually constituted.
Another key challenge for implementing the model was with respect to resource allocation. The amount of data needed for STARS was substantial and the university had no established way of gathering that information. This challenge will be alleviated over time, but the sustainability department only has nine people, so it may find meeting the requirements of STARS to be burdensome. In addition, some of the data required may be superfluous -- the STARS program is generic and some things may not apply to all universities.

3. SU's participation in the STARS pilot study is unlikely to add value to the institution. The pilot study is only a means of recording or measuring sustainability achievements. It has not fully integrated the concepts of the balanced scorecard. What the balanced scorecard is intended to do is to focus organizations on…