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Strategic Planning Meeting Updates

December 2015

Strategic Planning Monthly Update – December 2015

The purpose of these monthly updates is to regularly share the work of the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) with the college.

Progress with regard to our timeline: November was designated as a month to “Collect Input and Gather Data.” Our focus this past month has been on considering input about and drafting the college’s mission, vision and values. Additionally, we continued gathering input and data to assist with our environmental scan. As a reminder, the environmental scan will lead to an identification of the college’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats we should consider in the strategic planning process.

Mission, vision and values (M/V/V): The SPC met four times in November, and three of these meetings were devoted to the college’s M/V/V. At the first of these three meetings, we reviewed feedback from members of the college, discussed the saliency of these ideas and agreed on which elements to include in the M/V/V. One member of the committee then wrote an initial draft of our M/V/V. At our second meeting, the committee engaged in a lively review and discussion of this draft. We determined that another round of review and revisions of the draft M/V/V was needed before sharing it with the college. Two committee members then prepared a revised draft. We held a third SPC meeting to deliberate on this revised draft, engaged in another in-depth discussion and agreed on a more polished version to share with the college. While we began with a blank slate for this draft, many elements from our existing mission, vision and values were carried forward. The new elements and language reflect our current thinking on the college’s purpose, identity and aspirations. We will continue to receive feedback from the internal community into the spring and look forward to sharing a draft later in 2016.

Feedback Report: The SPC actively seeks input from members of the college community to help shape the strategic planning process. In October and November, we held multiple constituent sessions and all-college open sessions and sought input from the all-college committees, the presidents’ commissions and division heads. The division heads that serve on the SPC provided feedback from several offices and departments in their areas. Through these channels, we received rich feedback. We also invited individuals and groups, such as departments, offices, other committees and student groups, to send ideas to the SPC. In November, seven groups (two academic departments, three executive committees of multiple academic departments and two academic offices) and 18 individuals (eight faculty members, three students, four alumni and one parent) responded to this invitation and sent feedback to either the planning@dickinson.edu email or directly to the SPC co-chairs. We strongly encourage groups and individuals to continue sharing their ideas as we progress through our strategic planning work.

Upcoming work – Environmental Scan and SWOT Analysis: The next step in the strategic planning process is an environmental scan, which involves two types of analyses. We have divided the SPC into four working groups to more efficiently perform these analyses. Two working groups will consider separate aspects of the external environment to identify key trends and issues in the social, demographic, technological, political, legal and competitive realms. The other two working groups will consider separate aspects of the college’s internal resources and capabilities, including financial, human, organizational and programmatic. The full SPC will then synthesize the reports from all four working groups to craft an assessment of the college’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). The environmental scan and the SWOT analysis will be shared with the college at the start of the spring semester and used to identify the strategic priorities for our next plan.