Each of us is intimately involved with designing the plan, tying the plan to the colleges' budget, creating accountability structures to ensure the plan is completed, and providing the research component to support the plan. For many of us, because of where our particular school is in the planning process, this is a very large commitment of time. Only Manchester and Gateway have programs in place to routinely ascertain most of the information necessary for this project. Time estimates to create this data, based upon Manchester's experience, is approximately one full-time person for six to eight months. Our current Information Systems do not have the capability to provide some of these financial data at all.
Further analysis is necessary and cumbersome.
Once done, explaining the results in a meaningful fashion to a lay audience is extremely difficult. Based upon the Department of Labor External Scan compiled by Tunxis in November of 1994, it takes approximately one person month to produce a quality document. We have no estimated time for this project, as its definition is nebulous at the moment and will require some background research just to understand the scope of the project. On some campuses this is an emerging priority, and will probably advance to the top of the campus demands placed upon some researchers' time. If the plan follows the current direction favored by Dr. Daube, significant effort will be required to collect survey data and focus group data from the constituencies.