Director's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue19 1–31 August 2021
This week the University launched its new strategic plan, ANU 2025. I encourage everyone at RSAA to read this document and think about how it affects you and how you might contribute to achieving the goals it sets out. In due course the School will need to respond with its own strategic plan, set in the context of the University plan and making it specific and relevant within our areas of responsibility in astronomy and astrophysics. We also will need an RSAA strategic plan to present at the next School 5-year review, anticipated to be held in 2022, so this process is timely for us.
As a first step towards developing the RSAA strategic plan, senior staff participated in a two-day retreat last week. We discussed a wide range of issues covering all areas of the School’s activities, ranging from the impact of COVID-19 on staff and students to the opportunities presented by major new astronomical facilities expected in the next few years. We examined RSAA’s education, research and outreach programs and we thought about the future of SSO, the AITC and CGA. It was interesting to hear a wide variety of different perspectives and encouraging to see consensus beginning to emerge on ways to deal with some of the challenges RSAA faces. All of these thoughts and ideas have been captured and will be reviewed by the RSAA Executive as inputs to RSAA’s strategic plan.
However the retreat was just two days and just the senior staff. There was only an hour or so to discuss each major topic and we did not have perspectives from all RSAA staff and HDR students. Therefore, both to allow more extensive discussions and to broaden the range of inputs, we plan to hold a series of mini-workshops on a variety of key topics that will need to be addressed in the School's strategic plan. These workshops will be open to all RSAA staff (both academic and professional) and to all RSAA HDR students, and I encourage you to participate in any of the workshops that are on topics of interest to you. More details of these workshops will follow soon, but I expect they will occur over the next couple of months.
The results of the workshop discussions will be evaluated by the RSAA Executive, which will use them to help draft an initial version of the School’s strategic plan, ‘RSAA 2025’. This draft plan (which I aim to keep relatively short) will be circulated to the whole School for feedback and we will probably be the subject of an All-School Meeting to allow open discussion. Based on this feedback the Executive will revise the draft and, if major revisions are needed, iterate the consultation process. Once there is a broad consensus supporting the School plan it will go to the Dean and VC for approval, hopefully before the end of the year.
Strategic planning can seem abstract and irrelevant, but I hope the RSAA strategic plan will be both concrete and relevant to everyone in the School. To ensure it is, I ask you all to engage with this process and contribute your thoughts and ideas to shaping the future of RSAA.
Matthew Colless
