Pack Practices for Successful Initiatives
June 2025 | Courtney Thornton
Imagine a sports team stacked with talented players. Each player has a strength. One is quick, while another is strategic. Each player has a different support system, from equipment to personal staff. They share one goal as a team — winning a national championship. To reach this goal, these players must perform consistently and cohesively at a high level. How will that come about? With a playbook, practice drills and effective coaching.
Similar to this fictional team, NC State is stacked with talented leaders striving to maximize individual strengths and resources to help reach institutional goals. In the same way the players on the sports team know the team playbook is critical for team success, NC State’s leaders also seek trusted, accessible tools to drive successful initiatives.
Through our work with NC State’s implementation plan contacts, our team has begun developing such a playbook. We call them Pack Practices for Successful Initiatives.
These six practices — clarity, plans, engagement, readiness, progress and continuity — are important to any initiative, regardless of its size and scope. Each practice offers essential insights and activities rooted in project management, change management, process improvement and strategic planning. Each practice requires leaders to both think and do. While the practices are loosely ordered, some may be visited and revisited throughout an initiative.
Our team has begun using the Pack Practices framework to align our services and growing set of tools for implementation plan contacts. We’re also using the framework to focus the direct implementation support we provide to select implementation plan contacts.
While our main customers are implementation plan contacts, this playbook is available to anyone leading change at NC State. Check it out, and let us know what you think.
Interested to learn more about practices that foster successful initiatives at NC State? Contact Genevieve Rockett, Implementation Specialist, Institutional Strategy and Analysis at gcrocket@ncsu.edu.