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The rapidly changing education and research landscape makes it as important now as ever for CU Boulder to have a sound process in place for long-term facilities planning. That’s why I’m excited to announce the official kickoff of our Strategic Facilities Visioning effort, a collaborative yearlong initiative that will engage stakeholders from across campus to create a framework for facilities decision-making for the next 30 years.

Vice Chancellor for Infrastructure and Sustainability David Kang

Campus Architect Bill Haverly is leading the initiative with the support of an executive committee of campus leaders, including students. The Chancellor’s Strategic Imperatives and Academic Futures provide the guiding principles from which we’re launching this effort. We’ll also be taking into account parallel planning efforts ongoing around campus as we aim to ensure facilities continue to enhance student success and support the campus mission while simultaneously improving the efficiency and resiliency of our infrastructure well into the future.

The executive committee, along with our consultant team from AECOM Strategy Plus, recently held its kickoff meeting to lay the groundwork for the four-phase process to come. The first phase of the initiative over the coming weeks and months is a deep dive with each college, school and support organization on campus in which we’ll examine institutional benchmarks, gather data and analyze individual strategic plans and visions. Leaders from each of these units have nominated teams of “visionaries” to represent their organizations in this process. We’ve begun initial outreach to these visionaries this week and will begin a series of in-person sessions with them later this month.

We will also be holding town halls to gather ideas and perspective from our broader campus community. Updates on the initiative will be posted over time on the Strategic Facilities Visioning website, which will provide an additional channel for members of our campus community to provide their own ideas and feedback. The inclusive, cross-disciplinary approach will help ensure that we have a holistic view of individual program visions as we craft an integrated vision for how facilities can support overall campus needs.

In November, we’ll advance into the scenario planning phase, where we define measures of success, flesh out program-change scenarios, establish prioritization criteria, identify and rank initiatives, and dive into initial financial modeling. That will be followed by a vision strategy phase where we’ll examine resource and infrastructure needs, examine space and operational standards, dive into real estate location planning and phasing, and conduct risk and delivery analysis. Finally, a fourth phase to establish the operations plan will be aimed at drafting the final vision and tool prototypes that we’ll use to inform facilities decision-making.

Ultimately, the chief goal of these efforts is to create a unified, university-first vision for facilities that supports the changing education and research landscape. Strategic Facilities Visioning will also create the foundation for our next campus master plan update.

I look forward to the opportunity that Strategic Facilities Visioning presents as we strive to meet the pressing facilities needs of today while aligning with the vision for tomorrow.

Sincerely,

David Kang
Vice Chancellor for Infrastructure and Sustainability