What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic Planning is the pathway to delivering our mission and, at Hostos, strategic planning is focused squarely on student success. Our Mission statement states our purpose, and articulates outcomes. Our Operational Plans are the steps we take to implement our Strategic Plan goals, and deliver on our commitments to students, live our mission. “Strategy, as a concept, sits between mission and operational plans.” (https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/02/14/colleges-need-rethink-strategic-planning-opinion - Peter Eckel and Cathy Trower)
Hostos Community College sets its college-wide priorities, goals, and outcomes to strengthen student learning and organizational capacity. Hostos sets multi-year strategic plans and executes them via an annual operational planning process that identifies how areas across the college will advance institutional priorities.
What Is Operational Planning?
Since 2012, the goals identified in Hostos’ strategic plans have been implemented through a college-wide process called operational planning.
While operational planning has taken different forms and the template used has provided different levels of detail over the years, it has consistently represented a process whereby divisions, and the departments and units within them, identify college-wide action areas to help make progress toward strategic plan goals and indicators of success.
Having years of operational plan experience has helped Hostos coordinate college-wide actions toward a common student success-focused agenda, as well as continuously improve the operational planning process itself. In AY19-20, Hostos adopted a standardized annual planning and assessment report template (A-PART). A-PART is used college-wide and supports and documents department and unit-based engagement in operational planning while connecting operational planning more deeply to department and unit-based assessment activities.
A-PART calls upon each AES unit and academic department at Hostos to define a series of activities for the year that helps them improve their effectiveness and advance college goals, assess progress, and propose actions to support continuous improvement.
A-PART proposed actions are finalized with divisional leader input, to ensure individual A-PARTs support annual operational plan priorities. While divisional leadership maintains a team-based focus on college-wide priorities, and those priorities are reflected in a college-wide operational plan document, individual departments and units now more clearly define their work in support of those priority actions. This has standardized and deepended participation and engagement among departments and units and aligns operational planning more closely with department and unit-based assessment processes, so that decision-making can become even more connected to assessment activities.