When John Bardo was selected as Wichita State president, he promised he would bring changes and improvements to the university. Soon afterward, he set about devising a strategic plan for the university. 

It is now getting ready to bear fruit.

Bardo started with the Strategic Planning Initiative, a group that would seek input from not just faculty and administrators on campus, but students, Kansas legislators, businesses, Wichita residents, and anyone else with a good idea.

Cindy Claycomb, a co-chair on the steering committee and a professor of marketing at WSU, said that Bardo wants this group to provide results that were useful and not influenced by any personal biases.

“He turned it over to us,” Claycomb said. “He’s been very hands-off, letting us gather the input and him not driving he plan but the plan being driven by the community.”

An extensive amount of feedback has been collected since then.

Feedback first started in September with a kick-off event with over 400 participants who were asked questions ranging from what WSU should have as a mission statement to what are the strengths and weaknesses of the university.

They then took that feedback and have been doing a series of “town hall” meeting since then to help get more feedback. The meetings have tried to target groups – one was for students, another for faculty and another one just for the Wichita community.

In fact, town halls are just a small part of what the SPI has done. There have been numerous meetings with different groups, letters sent in with suggestions, surveys taken and much more. The data collection has been large and varied.

Claycomb has said that they have only now finished processing their data. “We’ve captured the transcripts from all those meetings, and we’ve content analyzed all that data and are bringing that to the steering committee next week,” she said.

They are now ready for the next big step, creating the rough draft of a strategic plan. To help do that, they’ll start with a two-day retreat to start writing the plan.

“It’ll be a lot of notes and pieces of the plan, and we think it’ll take us about a month to flesh it out and write the plan,” Claycomb said.

The plan is to create a university that works better Claycomb said. 

“We have a great university, but I think it could be better and I think the things that’ll come out of the strategic plan will lay the groundwork for that,” she said.