Quarterly Business Review
Recap

Dear colleagues,

We are now over halfway through Catalyst, our strategic plan for the 20-21 academic year. As working groups continue to make headway on the five strategic initiatives, I’d like to update you on our progress.

I also want to express my gratitude to our sponsors and facilitators for their leadership, time, and energy to move our organization forward through the strategic initiatives and working groups they lead.

Many thanks to all the sponsors and facilitators:

Professional Development: Alea Henle, Donna Richardson, & Rachel Makarowski.
Adaptability: Elias Tzoc, Jody Perkins, & Kim Hoffman.
Virtual Spaces and Services: Stan Brown, Ken Irwin, & Alia Levar Wegner.
Communicating Services: Kevin Messner, Nick Kneer & Nate Floyd.
Meaningful Partnerships: Bill Modrow, Carla Myers & Katie Gibson.

Top three takeways:

Your input is valuable. Please take some time to fill out surveys and participate in focus groups as they come across your inbox.
Our strategic plan continues to support organizational and campus alignment while remaining nimble to meet the needs of the present. We continue to see momentum and movement forward on strategic initiatives, even when action items need to shift or change.
The work we’re focused on is practical. This is not a thought experiment or a wish list; Catalyst will result in real and positive change.

Why business review meetings?

These quarterly sessions give us an opportunity to continually align with our vision and values and meet our current needs.

Yesterday, on February 16, we held the second of three business review meetings with the senior leadership team and strategic plan sponsors and facilitators. The slides from the meeting and the strategic plan progress dashboard can also be found at any time on our internal Catalyst LibGuide.

Reflection

After hearing updates from each working group (see the slides to learn more about what each group has been up to), we went into breakout sessions to tackle these areas:

Reflect on what is working and what’s not
Work-to-date feedback and conversation
Looking ahead feedback and conversation
What does success over the next 90ish days look like?

From these questions, we concluded:

There is much excitement and appreciation about the forward momentum of our strategic plan — thank you to our entire community for your involvement and efforts.
Finding the balance between forward momentum and realistic expectations, especially during a pandemic, can prove challenging. We continue to make adjustments and reprioritize as needed.
The inclusion of students and their leadership is key to our current success, both in initiative work and receiving input. For example, the Virtual Spaces and Services (VSS) working group collaborated with a capstone class to develop a digital services marketing campaign.

What’s next

Strategic initiative sponsors and facilitators will meet to review the outcomes. Then, they’ll set plans and make any changes. The next business review meeting will be at the end of April.
This information — along with the dashboard, updated at least monthly — can be accessed through the internal webpage at any time.
Updates will continue to be shared monthly in Connections.

Surveys

Please take some time to fill out the following surveys:

Professional Development Survey. This survey will close on February 22.
The Communications Survey is still open, and will close on February 26.
Keep an eye out for a survey asking for input from the Adaptability working group in the next couple of weeks. Thank you in advance for your input.

Peace,

Jerome