The Strategic Planning Committee is nearing the end of their year-long planning process. They presented a draft of their plan to the Board of Trustees on Oct. 18 and expect to submit their final draft for adoption by the board in December. Plan implementation is targeted to start in spring 2019 (some parts of the plan have actually already headed into implementation), according to Michael Wiehe, co-chair of the Strategic Planning Committee and director of the Applied Policy Research Institute.
The planning process started in late January 2018. Since then, the committee has met on a consistent basis, welcoming members from the Wright State community to contribute to the development process along the way. Incorporating community voices early and often was a priority to the committee.
"The draft document represents the cumulative effort of hundreds of people who have been working on these ideas for the last ten months," said David Bright, co-chair of the Strategic Planning Committee and chair of the Department of Management and International Business.
Early meetings established the plan's vision, values and a mission statement. The later, more recent meetings have been directed at concretizing those abstract ideas. By starting with abstract constraints, like 'values, vision and mission,' the committee hoped that the participants would be given plenty of room to be creative when developing initiatives to turn those ideas into reality. The draft as it stands can be found in summary and in full online.
The strategic plan is divided into six "pillars." These are foundational areas within the university, like research, innovation and entrepreneurship and establishing relationships with the university's outside partners. The pillars are then split into a prioritized list of projects. Each project will be assigned to someone within the leadership of the university, according to Bright.
These individuals, according to the draft of the plan, "will need to be proactive, soliciting ideas and incorporating diverse perspectives." Then, bi-annually, the projects will be evaluated by a matrix of 22 metrics. "The metrics will be public and interactive. Anyone, students or otherwise, will have access to them and be able to see them for themselves," Bright said.
This plan was intentionally made as a "living document," according to Wiehe. The committee will host a plan re-evaluation summit every semester. If certain aspects of the plan aren't working out or need tweaked, the committee will have an opportunity to fix them as early as spring semester. "This is the first round of implementation and we'll see what works, what doesn't, what needs to be changed and what should be added. It will be a dynamic process," Bright said.
Now, for the most part, the development phase is over. "We are at a milestone moment in the process. We've identified the major foci of the strategic plan. We are now in a refinement phase," Bright said. Both Wiehe and Bright want to welcome student feedback. Read the document and
give them feedback. "Even now, we want to be continuing in the same spirit of openness and inclusion that we've maintained throughout the process," Bright said.
