After more than a year in the making, the vice president for business affairs will present the University Strategic Plan, which will then be voted on during the Board of Trustees meeting.

The meeting will be at 1 p.m. in the University Ballroom of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Bill Weber, the vice president for business affairs, presented a draft of the plan at the January meeting, and the board members contacted Weber with suggestions within the past six weeks.

“We have gotten a lot of feedback from the board members, and most of it has been quite complimentary of our work,” Weber said. “They offered several suggestions for improvement, which have been incorporated into the final plan.”

The changes range from word choices to better clarification of what the plan intends to accomplish.

“The major change people will see is we’ve included a basic implementation plan,” Weber said. “The board very much wanted to see more detail of possible implementation and when the items might occur.”

Possible implementation depends on a variety of things including funding from different sources such as state appropriations.

Weber said he and his team have divided the next five years of the timeline into three phases. The first phase will run through the end of the 2013 calendar year.

The second phase will go from January 2014 thru July 2015. The third and final phase will go from July of 2015 to the end of the 2016 calendar year.

“The ideas in the plan we will implement first are the ones that are very close to our current initiatives or are of critical importance,” Weber said.

Weber said items that have higher costs such as technology purchases will be a part of the final phase as they take longer.

Currently the implementation of the increased technology initiative is scheduled for this phase, but this could change and be moved up if funding increases.

“This is a tentative plan, as circumstances change such as funding, we will have to adjust it,” Weber said. “It is a flexible implementation plan.”

If approved, students, faculty and community members can track the progress of the plan at the strategic planning website. Weber will also present the plan to other campus governing groups.

“I’m hoping to pull the strategic planning steering committee together once a year so we can give them the update and get their feedback,” Weber said.

At the Board of Trustees meeting, Weber will present a few PowerPoint slides and then the board will vote on the plan.

“I’ll give a short condensed version of the plan, basically where we’ve been and where we’re going,” Weber said.

Amy Wywialowski can be reached at 581-2812 or alwywialowski@eiu.edu.