Appendix 4: Planning Process
In the fall of 2016, Rear Admiral Michael Alfultis initiated a new Maritime College strategic planning process. This process was designed to be an immersive, expansive effort in critical thinking about the College’s programs and future direction in the context of its current and anticipated environment. To obtain diverse perspectives and creative thinking, Admiral Alfultis committed the College to an inclusive, transparent process that engaged faculty, students, staff, alumni, and industry partners.
Admiral Alfultis, in consultation with the faculty, appointed a Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) to guide the planning process, the membership of which included individuals from across the College. The planning process included extensive interviews and focus group discussions with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and industry leaders. These discussions were designed to tap broad pools of expertise and opinion on and off campus. Maritime College’s consulting partner AKA Strategy (AKA) conducted these conversations as an independent third party. AKA developed hypotheses, suggestions, and feedback from the discussions and analysis of trends in industry and higher education; moderated review and discussion by the SPC; and prepared a strategic plan framework that outlined six strategic goals and two to three objectives for each strategic goal.
As clear strategic goals for the College emerged and objectives for achieving the goals developed, the SPC established six subcommittees to advance specific actions in order to accomplish the goals and objectives of the plan. The subcommittees included members from the wider campus community. Their work was supplemented with ideas generated by focus groups held during the fall 2017 convocation that faculty and staff were encouraged to attend.
A steering committee of the SPC was also established to review the actions developed by the six subcommittees, identify overlaps and narrow down the number of actions to the three to five they felt were most important for each objective. This resulted in over 50 actions that the plan would commit the College to undertake.
In subsequent discussions, the SPC agreed that it would be preferable to examine the actions further and identify one action for each objective, combining where necessary the elements of several actions. The steering committee took this step to create the draft that is now the College strategic plan. However, the SPC also agreed that it would be important to retain the full list of prioritized actions developed by the subcommittees as a resource for those individuals and groups who would be involved in implementing the strategic plan.
In November 2017, a revised draft of the strategic plan was released to faculty, staff and external partners involved in the earlier stages of the planning process, together with a survey requesting feedback. The SPC took into account the feedback and oversaw the preparation of a final draft of the plan, which was posted on the College’s strategic planning web page in December 2017, with a request that readers share their thoughts about it with the SPC. In January 2018, Admiral Alfultis hosted a series of town hall discussions with faculty and staff to present the final draft and solicit final feedback. The SPC reviewed the perspectives and suggestions gained from the town halls to further shape the strategic plan. The Foundation, Maritime College Council and the Student Government Association endorsed the strategic plan, which was adopted by the faculty in February 2018.