The Spring 1994 report of the Committee for Implementation of the Strategic Plan recommended the establishment of a permanent Standing Committee for Strategic Planning (SCSP). In response to this recommendation, the SCSP was established in the fall of 1994, and charged with three primary responsibilities:

Throughout the strategic planning process, the SCSP was guided by the four overarching university goals that were established in the Sam Houston State University Strategic Plan (adopted April 1991). These goals stated that Sam Houston State University will:

In the fall of 1996, the SCSP was renamed the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC). The three-fold charge of the SPC remained, namely: to develop environmental scans, to formulate and prioritize strategies based on these scans, and to evaluate how successfully the adopted strategies were implemented.

In the fall and summer of 1997 the Strategic Planning Committee membership was redesigned with the intent to include key decision makers as well as faculty members on the committee. The newly redesigned committee included the Faculty Senate Chair, the Faculty Senate Chair-Elect, the Student Government Association President, a member of the previous year’s Strategic Planning Committee (for one year to provide continuity with the committee as previously structured), the Director of Institutional Research, the Vice President for Student Services, the Vice President for Finance and Operations, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs as chair. As the year developed and the institution hired a chief development officer, he was added to the committee. It was intended that this committee would give a broader perspective to strategic planning and would integrate the process more effectively with the institutional budget committee.

This new committee was given specific charges for the year including the development of a more systematic planning process which employed broader input from all levels of the university in a recursive fashion, using extensive feedback loops from assessment of outcomes to modify new goals and objectives. It was also intended that the activities of the committee would be integrated with, and inform the budgeting process. The graphical representation of this process is contained in Appendix A.

Because the newly composed Strategic Planning Committee was designing the planning process at the same time as it was creating a strategic plan that year, the time lines proposed in Attachment A could not be exactly adhered to and were somewhat delayed. This year those time lines have been adjusted in some minor ways as informed by experience and are now very workable.

Goals of each division were developed as indicated in the time line with regular two-way feedback, i.e., goals at the division, college, and department level were modified and developed as the result of draft goals at each other level in a recursive fashion.