(MSWord Version of Full Plan)
I was persuaded to write a strategic plan for my own administrative office by the late Dr. David MacKenzie, Executive Director of the Northeast Regional Association of State Agricultural Experiment Station Directors—NERA. Dave was an expert in strategic planning. He had written a book about it and had used a formal plan for his office (updated each year) to communicate with his clients, the Northeast Station Directors. I thought that was a very useful approach, both for organizing one's individual workload, as well as for communicating it, so I wrote one of my own.
In July 1999, I began a two year dual-director assignment, administering both the Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension. Federal pressures to unify the research and outreach agendas of the Land Grant programs gave Rhode Island a strong incentive to change organizational structure, and assuming leadership was an excellent opportunity for me to effect significant change.
The first step was to write a unified five-year Plan of Work for the Station and Cooperative Extension, which I submitted within two weeks of accepting the CE interim directorship in July 2000. The Plan called for refocusing the Station toward specific outcomes, under seven program areas.
To carry out the Plan, I revised the RIAES approach to project funding. The FY2002 Request for Proposals completed a deliberately paced 4-year process of converting the Station from a virtual entitlement to the academic departments to a competitive, outcome-oriented funding mechanism. The format of the FY02 RFP was congruent with guidelines from the 1998 Farm Bill. I was honored to be told that the Rhode Island RFP was adapted as the format for multistate research projects in an early draft of the Multistate Research Manual (CSREES), according to Dr. MacKenzie, who used it to break an impasse with the other three regional executive directors as they drafted the new Manual.
With a programmatic Plan of Work in place and implemented through the RFP, there were a number of unencompassed residual issues that were the proper focus of the AES and CE Director.
—The unique position of the Rhode Island AES and CE of being at the bottom nationally in state or university support (measured as match for state to federal dollars, etc.) was critical; I had already engaged in a very long effort to work with the state legislature to develop a line-item for Land Grant programs (the norm for funding in most states) and I wanted to articulate my intentions and rationale for continuing that engagement.—I was also interested in building a closer collaboration with RI Sea Grant: starting late in the Scott Nixon administration—and continued under interim Director Ames Colt—we had agreed to a joint land and sea grant publication, 41N. This publication replaced a regional Sea Grant multistate publication, and also served as a way to communicate (3 times per year) with legislators, University administrators, and the public about the work of both programs. 41N (the name taken from the latitude of Rhode Island) was a quality effort, benefitting from the huge talents of Malia Schwartz and Sam Peterson. It was hugely symbolic given the myopic intramural back-stabbing that is characteristic of the majority of Land and Sea Grant programs which battle each other elsewhere. These were issues for my adminstrative Strategic Plan.
In December 2000, I met with the Provost to discuss the Plan. Unfortunately, we never discussed this plan at all. Instead, the Provost informed me that the candidate for Academic Dean of the College of Life and Environmental Sciences would become Director of both the AES and CE, despite prior promises to me to the contrary. I had asked for too much, too often, and was now to pay the price.
Academic strategic plans are too often a huge waste of time, largely because they are seldom acted upon once written. For the reasons given above, however, I believe in them. I present my plan here for you to consider on its merits, and for historical value. The section "How Partners Can Help (suggested by Glen Kumekawa), for example, is (I believe) novel, and something that you may want to consider if you are engaging in a planning exercise and would like to use this document as a structural model.
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