The article considers methods and approaches to setting strategic goals of the university and their cascading into specific, measurable projects, activities and actions with clear performance indicators, which allows building a clear chain from the vision and mission of the university to the concept of performance of specific actions and processes. These processes contribute to the effectiveness of management and monitoring.

The authors consider the specifics of strategy building for higher education institutions, which are large in scale and are regulated by organisations that have to conduct strategic planning in a highly long-range predictive situation. The authors identify the problem of effective operationalization of the strategy of universities and propose a mechanism for deploying goals and a mixed approach to writing a strategy, the combination of which makes it possible to maximize the involvement of the university staff in the strategizing process, which helps to increase motivation and employee engagement. The scientific innovation of the article is the description and approbation of the hybrid approach to creating strategy, which allows creating a unique strategic positioning due to the involvement of university managers and employees.

The main research methods are the research of the experience of the leading universities in the country, through the analysis of their strategies and development programs; the analysis of the problems of writing strategies of universities; approbation of the proposed approaches in the strategy development of Omsk State Technical University.