NEW BRUNSWICK -- In many ways, Rutgers University's athletics program is its own municipality.

Armed with a $75 million annual budget, the athletics program on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campuses includes 250 employees in its workforce, including more than 100 coaches. The department serves more than 650 student-athletes participating in 24 Division I sports in the Big Ten Conference, and draws the attention -- and scrutiny -- of hundreds of thousands of alums and fans nationwide.

"If somebody were to give you $75 million and say, 'You have to spend it,' the first thing you'd do is come up with a plan of how you're going to spend the $75 million,'' Rutgers Athletics Director Pat Hobbs told NJ Advance Media. "I think it was Yogi Berra who said, 'If you don't know where you're going, it's hard to get there.' That's sort of what I said to the staff last week; I said, 'Hey, it's hard to know where we're going if we don't have a plan.''

It's why Hobbs says the department he presides over is in the infancy stage of developing a first-of-its-kind strategic plan to map out the future of Rutgers Athletics.

"I have plenty of ideas in my head of where things should end up,'' Hobbs said. "But I have no ownership on all good ideas. And at the end of it you want everybody to have a voice in it. There's a value in the process.''

The strategic plan process could take anywhere between 6-to-9 months to formulate, and once complete it will be a public document appearing on the athletic department's website, according to Hobbs.

"It doesn't have to be 100 pages; it could be as short as 20 pages, but it's basically going to give us a map for where we want to go, a plan that establishes the priorities for the department, and also identifies the order in which we're going to address those priorities,'' Hobbs said.

Hobbs hopes to appoint a leadership team of 10-to-15 people from various constituencies in the athletics department to participate in the initial discussions. Steve Heisey, who serves as an organizational development consultant on Rutgers' New Brunswick campus, will work with the athletics leadership team to develop the initial strategic-planning approach.

Following that, every Rutgers Athletics staffer will receive a survey that, Hobbs said, is "going to benchmark how people feel about certain things in the department.'' Ryan Pisarri, who serves as the chief of staff under Hobbs, will be the point person in a series of focus groups that will likely include student-athletes, donors and select fans.

"The strategic plan will impact everyone associated with athletics and ultimately it's going to impact the entire university because part of what we need to talk about is what is our role,'' Hobbs said. "The first question that Steve (Heisey) asked at our full-staff meeting last week was for each table to spend a couple of minutes talking about, 'What is our reason for being? What is the role for an athletics department at a university?' That is truly the right starting point.

"At almost every table, the words 'student athlete' were part of the raison d'etre of the department. We also talked about our role as a collective ambassador for the university, our role of exciting our alums about all aspects of the university. The metaphor that gets used all the time is 'being the front porch of the university.' And we have an opportunity to have a positive impact across the university in a way that many departments simply don't have because they don't have the public exposure, they don't have the game exposure. In the end it will affect all the constituencies and hopefully in a positive way.''

Hobbs said the initial response from members of Rutgers' athletics department has been positive.

"What was surprising to me about it, the number of people who came up to me after the full-staff meeting and said they were genuinely excited about a strategic planning process,'' Hobbs said. "Which is sort of remarkable because I've done them before and never had even one person come up to me at the end of the announcement that they were excited about it.''

The last time he presided over a strategic plan document was in the late 1990s when he served as the dean of Seton Hall University's law school.

"I remember we had people come forward and say, 'We want to be the best at environmental law, we want to be the best at criminal law.' What won out was we were going to be a top school in health law and intellectual property,'' Hobbs said. "And today their health law school has been ranked in the top 10 for I think 15 straight years and their i.p. program is well respected as well. Those things all come out of that process.''

Since taking over the Rutgers athletics department in late November 2015, Hobbs has hired head football coach Chris Ash, launched a $100 million fundraising campaign for facilities, fired men's basketball coach Eddie Jordan and subsequently hired Steve Pikiell as his replacement, decided to extend Rutgers women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer's contract, announced that Rutgers is more than halfway toward its "R B1G Build'' goal, and promoted chief fundraiser Sarah Baumgartner to be his Deputy AD.

"I think the timing of this (strategic plan) is perfect,'' Hobbs said. "If we kicked this off seven months ago, people might not have fully bought in. But we've done enough things now in seven months where people see that I didn't come in to be a caretaker. I came here because there's so much potential. It's such a great university. We've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of work to do to compete in the Big Ten. I'm excited about doing (the strategic plan) because we have this stage that we're now on in the Big Ten, so I think the people involved will enjoy the process of imagining what we're going to be.''

Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KSargeantNJ. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook.