Lone Star College System & Lone Star College–Montgomery Strategic Planning
Lone Star College–Montgomery's strategic planning process was developed in tandem with the overall Lone Star College System strategic plan. The main thrusts of the Lone Star College System plan, including Student Success, Community Success, and Employee Success, are aligned with the Lone Star College–Montgomery plan.
Early in 2003, shortly after the arrival of Dr. Tom Butler as president, Lone Star College–Montgomery began a multi-faceted strategic planning process. The outlines of the process and the future steps required to ensure successful implementation are:
Using the College’s existing mission statement, “Learning to fulfill individual dreams and enhance community life is the mission of Lone Star College–Montgomery.”, as a starting point, the first step was to create a vision.
Strategic Planning formed a Taskforce
In the Fall of 2003, the College created a Strategic Planning Task Force and gave it the following charge:
- Assess relevant aspects of the internal and external environment of Lone Star College–Montgomery, particularly those related to the College Vision and Mission.
- Creatively consider the College’s future.
- Receive input from internal and external constituencies of the college.
- Establish benchmarks where necessary.
- Determine and prioritize broad strategies the college should pursue over the next 3-5 years.
- Prepare a written plan of action that addresses the 3 or 4 most important strategies.
- Periodically assess progress on the plan.
Taskforce Completed the Draft
At the end of the Fall 2003 semester the Task Force identified four strategic initiatives for the college, and a number of possible tasks/projects that were aligned with these initiatives. The initiatives centered on the following concepts:
Campuswide Open Forums Held
After review and agreement on this work by the college community, faculty, staff and administrators came together during the Spring semester of 2004 in open forums to identify a limited number of college-wide strategic projects for each of the initiatives, to be addressed over a three-year period. The culmination of this work is the Lone Star College–Montgomery Strategic Plan, 2004-2007.Principles & Guidelines for Implementation
In order to provide a structure to implement the strategic plan, the President’s Council, working closely with the Chair of the Strategic Planning Task Force, developed the following principles and guidelines for implementation, beginning in the Fall of 2004.
- Accomplishing the intent of the initiatives is not limited to the college-wide projects in the plan. All units of the college are encouraged to find ways to accomplish the aims of the initiatives, and include these in their division plans. Every individual employee is encouraged to find ways, large or small, to advance the initiatives as well.
- Each of the college-wide strategic projects will be implemented by a team of volunteers under the co-leadership of a member of the President’s Council, and a member of the college community. Because the projects are large, and intended to be implemented over a three year period, membership on a strategic project team is a long-term commitment.
- Because of the importance of the strategic projects, the college administration makes a strong commitment to providing the resources necessary to the teams to achieve successful projects.
- Each team will make annual progress reports to the President’s Council and to the Strategic Planning Task Force.
Teams Were Formed
Early in the Fall semester of 2004, a call for volunteers went out to serve on the strategic project implementation teams. Under the leadership of the team’s co-leaders, each team developed a plan of work for the year that would put them on target to complete the strategic project by the end of the three years of the plan (2004-2007). The teams were formed for the following concepts: