"Our strategic planning requires that we re-affirm those principles we consider basic, re-think how they are to be achieved, and re-align our efforts and emphases to achieve our goals."
(F.P. Osborn, Monroe Community College, 1986)

Lane's last major strategic planning effort was in 1988. That process, 10 years ago, created Lane's Mission, Vision, and Unifying Principles statements (1988).

Lane's current Strategic Planning Project actually began last year, when the President and the Board of Education realized that not only was institutional change in the air, but change was already happening...on many fronts, and in many ways. A number of vital activities directed at planning and preparation for change were underway in the college, each team responding in its own way to the trends they foresaw, each focused on adapting to, meeting, or anticipating the future as seen from its own perspective. These were efforts such as: Process Redesign/Students First; the Strategic Learning Initiative; the Technology Advisory and Coordinating Team; Bond User Groups; Instructional Services Strategic Planning, and others.

What was missing was a focal point, a central unifying process, that would discover, comprehend, and guide the work of all these diverse, and important, change initiatives toward common institutional goals. Thus, through Board mandate, was born the Strategic Planning Project. Through the completion of this broadly based and inclusive activity, all our discrete planning efforts will be unified by a common vision of what Lane Community College is, and where, over time we are headed.

The Strategic Plan itself, when completed, will formally state the newly drafted mission, values and vision of the college, and establish institutional goals to be achieved in order to support them.

The Board has recognized that for an educational institution to function well, in this day and age, operational and strategic planning are both necessary. According to planning expert Scott Ferguson,

"Operational planning involves monitoring present performance, present perceptions, and present expectations, whereas strategic planning involves revising expectations and moving towards the future." (1996)

In order to be meaningful, strategic planning "must involve insight and foresight" (Ferguson, 1996); that is, the plan must be practical and the plan must prepare for the future, not just catch up to the present. Furthermore, the plan itself must create the conditions for successful implementation - providing meaningful linkage between institutional decision making, operational planning, and actual performance on all levels of the college.