MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

17

OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

sense to do this or let’s continue to talk about it and someone takes charge of that or no, it doesn’t make sense.

We have had the basic framework for it at the beginning thanks to the efforts of Mr. Jim Bennett and a consultant that we brought on, Dave Shute, who have done this kind of process in a number of contexts including higher education contexts as well as other nonprofit contexts. So we have the basic framework but we needed to see how it would work within our environment. So Student Affairs volunteered before the break and we did a test run on Student Affairs. He noted that it was a really intensive process and they spent a lot of time under the leadership of Boyd Yarbrough and Clare Rahm, and brought in Student Affairs and Conference Services both and also Auxiliaries. He said that they really tried to figure out how to make this work. A lot of people really put in a lot of time and, from his own perspective, he was deeply involved and tried to attend as many of these meetings as possible. He noted that he came away incredibly impressed with the people we have here who were behind the scenes to make this work and were willing to engage in this process even though they didn’t have any guarantees about what was going to happen at the end. Student Affairs was guaranteed that whatever was produced from this process we wouldn’t immediately implement it unless they thought that it made sense and they would undergo it again later. Professor Ray reported that some of the things they thought would work in concept didn’t play out but when refining the process, they figured out how to do it a little bit faster and a little bit more efficiently. The net result was that the pilot was a success in the sense that this seemed to make sense, it seemed to have productive outcomes, and it might make a difference or it should make a difference in a meaningful way in the budget process.

What has been happening ever since then, really right away because meetings were scheduled immediately after our final wrap up meeting in Student Affairs, there are two pieces broken up or not exactly broken up. They sort of broke up the big ideas piece and then the unit by unit analysis had been rolled out in the beginning of January. Most of the units or a good chunk of the units, twenty plus, should be done by the end of March so we have time to generate some ideas that will affect FY17. Then some of the units including Student Affairs, because we made them do the pilot we were not going to make them do it again immediately, although a lot of their ideas actually have probably already been implemented. Professor Ray said that they will be done in April and June and hopefully still in time to get some results that will affect FY17.

Professor Ray commented that regarding the university unit, he would be happy to explain in more detail what the breakdown is with the combination of the university unit and a range of cross-cutting big ideas that either were in play before or were identified as they began to scrutinize the budget from a fifty thousand foot perspective. A team of Jim Bennett, Bonnie Kalnasy and he (Brian Ray) are looking at that concerning those sets of ideas and they are already in the process of talking with a number of people to try and see if any of those ideas make sense and what the results might be. The idea is to have a good chunk of this done by the end of spring semester and the rest of it done in time to get into the budget building process for FY17. But, necessarily some of the ideas that come out are complex and require timeframes that won’t hit in FY17 and so FY18 is