UHCL presents strategic plan for impacting 2025 and beyond

The University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) has a new strategic plan with the theme “Impact 2025 and Beyond” as of the formal March 5 reveal. UHCL President Ira K. Blake began the strategic planning process shortly after she arrived in 2017.

Blake along with Kevin Wooten, chief strategy officer; Joan Pedro, interim dean in the College of Education and professor in curriculum and instruction; and other UHCL administrators, faculty and staff have continuously been working on this plan since the spring of 2019. This new strategic plan is an outline for how UHCL will move forward and expand through the coming years.

During the March 5 presentation, co-chairs of the strategic planning committee Wooten and Pedro, revealed the plan’s timeline, mission, vision and values, along with how it will help the students and stakeholders succeed.

“Generally speaking, in the fall we began developing what we call the strategic themes and from the strategic themes we developed a strategy house, and from the strategy house [we] built the four themes we built the strategy around,” Wooten said. “We then invited a lot of people into the process where we developed our strategic objectives; there are 15 of those. And from that, another group came in and developed the metrics around those strategic objectives and also developed the strategic initiatives. The strategic objectives are something pretty broad, long term and the strategic initiatives are something shorter term.”

The themes developed – Educational Achievement, Inclusive Culture, Innovation Through Collaboration, and University Identity – were described in the March 5 presentation as “value-based pillars that act as the foundation of the strategic plan.”

The plan includes three tiers: Developmental, Implementation, and Individual Employee Plan and Development. UHCL has finished the developmental stage, or tier one, of the plan and is now moving on to the implementation stage, tier two. The strategic planning website states that the implementation stage will begin at UHCL this spring.

To help with the strategic planning process, the university hired the Balanced Scorecard Institute (BSI), a company that specializes in providing strategic management guidance. Wooten said they will continue to be involved in the plan.

“All universities do strategic planning,” Wooten said. “The way we’re doing strategic planning is the right way, the way that most successful businesses use the Balanced Scorecard approach because it just doesn’t focus on one or two things, things that make sense when you put them together and that’s why it’s important.”

The university also brought in Tia Brown McNair, vice president in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Student Success and executive director for Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Centers at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, to speak about inclusion and engagement for underserved student success.

In her Feb. 26 presentation, McNair spoke to faculty and administrators at UHCL about how success does not only come from the students but also from how the administrators and faculty receive and implement their feedback. She also spoke to students along with other administrators to hear feedback about how the university can improve.

She will continue helping the university with the plan and will return in the fall of 2020.

“When you have those levels of accountability that align with the strategic priorities and people have a shared awareness and shared values and shared goals of what that actually looks like, that is when you start becoming a more student-ready institution,” McNair said.

The strategic plan was made through assessing the university’s strengths and weaknesses, while also acknowledging the challenges and opportunities UHCL may face over the next five to seven years.

To ensure the mission, vision and values of the plan are met, the plan includes 15 strategic objectives, which are long term target areas. These objectives are to Improve Value of Diversity and Inclusion, Improve Technology, Improve Learning Resources, Improve Workload Management, Improve Campus Diversity, Improve Collaborative Community Presence, Improve Student Experience Process, Improve Business/ Academic Operations, Improve Communication, Increase Revenue, Improve Alignment of Resources with Priorities, Reduce Costs, Improve UHCL Experience, Improve Innovation and Increase University Recognition.

“At the university level and at the college and the division level, we will have very clear targets that we want to achieve, whether it be the educational end or the administrative end,” Wooten said. “If you look at the 15 objectives, they range in everything from increasing the diversity of the campus to increasing our brand and recognition in the community. What that means is that this plan allows us to have various specific targets to meet. A very clear metric so that we can see how we’re doing and the whole idea of this is that you adjust as you go along.”

The plan is designed to affect students both academically and developmentally.

“From Student Affairs, students can expect a more personalized one-on-one, hands-on approach to how we provide services to them,” said Vice President of Student Affairs Aaron Hart. “We will not have transactional relationships with our students; we will have personal one-on-one caring, considerate, empathetic relationships with our students. So they understand that our Hawks are our top priority.”

Wooten said some drawbacks can still be anticipated, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation has changed the way UHCL is operating, therefore impacting the strategic plan.

“Only to the extent that people have a lot on their plate,” Wooten said. “I think that when we get momentum, when we start implementing this more people will see the value of it because it allows us to say look what we have done.”

The strategic plan will continue the implementation process throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’ll do is, we are going to have some virtual orientation workshops in April, do some virtual work over the summer and then really finish that work up in the fall so that we don’t lose a lot of momentum,” Wooten said.