The Board Workflow provides a structure to how issues come before the Board for action, and it ensures those issues are necessary and help the Board achieve its strategic priorities and goals.  

The Board has limited bandwidth, so it must have a process in place by which it can determine how to use its limited resources to the greatest effect. This workflow places the Board’s committees at the center of this process to serve as gatekeepers for the flow of issues and action at the Board level. 

• There are many sources for potential system issues: Board members, institutions, the Commissioner’s office, the Legislature, the Governor’s office, trustees, auditors, or the general public. We want to direct all those proposed issues to the Commissioner’s office which, with the Board Executive Committee, can assign the issues to the appropriate committee. 
  
  
• Committee chairs can determine how they want to present the issue to their committee. It could be a presentation from a subject matter expert; it could be a written report; or, it could be any other method that will allow the committee to determine whether the issue either meets one of the Board’s strategic priorities or is part of the Board’s statutory obligations. 

• If the issue is not a strategic priority or is not a statutory obligation, the committee should consider tabling the issue. 

• If it is an issue the committee feels the Board should address, then the committee is the place to develop the action item. For example, if the issue will require a new policy or a policy change, the committee then engages the expert groups to develop the policy language. The expert groups ensure that Board is taking meaningful, informed, and appropriate action. 

• Once the policy, directive, initiative, or other action item is ready, the committee makes a recommendation to the Board. Depending on the substantive nature of the issue, it can be either on the consent calendar or the Board agenda. 

• We want to reserve the Committee of the Whole to discuss the most pressing, fundamental, substantive systemwide issues, leaving rudimentary, minor transactional, non-substantive issues for the consent calendar.