Stephen F. Austin State University

Colleagues,

Last year our SFA Envisioned 2023 Strategic Plan reached the midway point in its term. As we began preparing to engage in the second half of the plan’s implementation, we felt like we needed to check in with you to get your impressions of how the plan had been implemented to date.

To assist with this assessment we engaged Academic Impressions, a higher education professional development consulting firm, to help us better understand where we stand in six primary areas of plan implementation. Dr. Pat Sanaghan, who helped facilitate the original development of our plan, is a key contributor to the development of the instrument used, the Strategic Plan Implementation Effectiveness Survey (SPIES). SPIES assesses six key areas of plan implementation:

• Alignment
• Decision making
• Organizational discipline
• Collaboration
• Culture
• Engagement & inclusion

Last November, 472 of you participated in this study. Three clear themes emerged:

• First, sharing information more widely across campus needs to be improved.
• Second, more expedient and clear processes need to be implemented to move initiatives forward.
• Third, there must be a better alignment of resources with priorities.

A summary of the overall results within each key area is available on the SFA Envisioned 2023 website. You can also access a more detailed copy of the report there as well.

Thank you to all who took the time to participate in this study. As we move through the spring semester we will work hard to share information about the ways we are addressing what we learned.

We will start by inviting you to a breakfast with the cabinet on February 11, 2020 at 7:30 a.m. in the Twilight Ballroom. There I will be discussing what we learned from your response to the SPIES and we will outline some of the ways we will be engaging with you as we continue to provide transformative experiences for our students.

All the best for a great semester!

Office of the President Stephen F. Austin State University T 936.468.2201 | F 936.468.2202 www.sfasu.edu