Strategic Facilities Visioning ‘deep dive’ setting foundation for work to come
The Strategic Facilities Visioning (SFV) initiative, which will create a framework for facilities decision-making for the next 30 years, has been meeting since September with “visionaries” from every college, school and major support unit on campus—more than two dozen groups in all—as part of the effort’s initial deep dive phase.
The goal of the deep dive has been to gain a holistic view of individual program visions. The phase is rooted in understanding CU Boulder’s current state and the path to achieve a 30-year vision. Specifically, the SFV team has been working to understand what the university wants to accomplish, how stakeholders want to accomplish it, and how success will be measured.
As deep dive sessions with individual colleges, schools and support units unfold, some key themes are starting to emerge. Each conversation will be mapped to these themes to discover which topics arise across multiple departments and how they link to the chancellor’s strategic imperatives of lead, innovate and impact.
The SFV team is also working with the Academic Futures and Financial Futures teams to ensure that the direction of SFV is aligned with these high-priority campus planning initiatives.
“We’re thrilled with the insights we’re gaining and themes we’re starting to see emerge as we meet with more and more units across the campus,” said Bill Haverly, campus architect and project lead for the SFV effort. “These themes will prove invaluable in shaping our discussions as we move into the scenario planning phase in spring semester 2019.”
Scenario planning will be the next phase of SFV. During scenario planning, visionaries will work in interdisciplinary groups to develop and test future facilities and infrastructure options in relation to a variety of university growth and change opportunities. Those efforts will feed into the future vision strategy and operations plan phases that will follow later in 2019.
Key to the SFV initiative going forward, the deep dive phase is also helping lay the groundwork for creation of a facilities planning tool that will help inform impactful strategic investments in the coming decades. This decision-making tool will be one of the key outputs of the SFV efforts.
“Ultimately, all of this work is building toward articulating a strategic campus-wide vision that will be the foundation for our next campus master plan,” Haverly said.