Administrative Process Redesign project moves forward with training

It was a year of community building, problem solving and broadening the reach of the Administrative Process Redesign project (APR), the campus’s broad-based effort to create better business practices and systems.

“We’ve been able to harness an incredible amount of energy and creativity to help improve some of the ways we serve our customers,” says Alice Gustafson, project leader. “It’s been a ground-up effort that’s changing the way we think about improvement and change.”

APR, which began in the spring of 2007, has brought the expertise of people closest to the daily tasks together to find ways to improve work processes. Teams of employees — more than 80 persons in all — worked to streamline practices, leverage technology and focus the campus on reducing frustration, preserving resources and providing high-quality customer service.

They received specialized training — by UW–Madison experts — in Lean Six Sigma process improvement techniques designed to accurately identify and correct defects in business practices. The teams then applied that knowledge to 10 different problems, six in the project’s first generation and another four in a second round.

The first round of projects ranged from managing information technology access for new, transferring or departing employees to reducing time for processing grant sub-agreements to a pair of projects focused on improving how UW Foundation gift funds are transferred to the university and tracked.

Another four projects — which began late last June — are expected to begin implementation in January.

They involve improving IT access to the mainframe system for new employees, improving the process for requesting and approving overload and cutting the time needed to make corrective non-salary cost transfers, and creating a process for setting up collaborative research approvals across multiple departments.

The team working on the collaborative research approvals found that the process is inconsistent across campus and can take from one to 147 days to complete. The goal is to create a more consistent process that takes an average of two days and no more than 14 days.

Mary Czynszak-Lyne, office administrator of the College of Letters and Science Honors Program and vice president of Local 2412, says the training was especially helpful.

“I really appreciate the Lean Six Sigma training — especially the emphasis on having a systematic method to identify process improvement,” says Czynszak-Lyne, a member of the project’s leadership team.

Brenda Spychalla, a senior information processing consultant in the School of Education and a member of the APR Information Technology Team, says the project provides a framework for lasting improvement.

“I am not aware of any other projects like APR on campus and believe that the project will be able to fix problems at the source,” Spychalla says. “Current processes on campus force faculty and staff to be too dependent on the departmental expert of a certain process. APR will improve and standardize processes so departments will not have to keep reinventing the wheel.”

The project has also focused team members on the values and expectations of internal and external customers, with the idea that until they understand customers they can’t make headway on identifying improvements.

“People have come to realize that APR is a way to build respect,” says Gustafson. “We’re understanding that it’s not people who are at fault — it’s the processes that are broken. People are sorting things out in a different way and having more productive, open conversations.”

Through Lean Six Sigma, one of the most revealing moments often comes when team members “walk the process,” shorthand for following a problematic process from start to finish to identify improvement areas.

“One of the things that surprised team members was when they’ve come to an office to walk the process, people have been very welcoming. They’re more than happy to be asked to help solve the problem, and that’s great,” Gustafson says.

New Web resource available

A new Web resource has been launched to improve obtaining access to campus information technology (IT) systems.

It’s called the IT Access List.

This improvement was made as a result of the work of the Administrative Process Redesign (APR) team, IT Access for Transferring Employees, in partnership with Division of Information Technology staff who helped develop this new resource.

This APR redesign team focused on decreasing the time it takes to gain access to IT systems. In listening to those involved, the team discovered that many supervisors are unaware of all the IT tools their employees need and how to request access. In response, the team developed a list of campus IT systems — the IT Access List, which includes contact and access information.

An improvement has also been implemented in the Classified Human Resources Information System (CHRIS) so that shortly after most appointments are approved within CHRIS, supervisors will be prompted to use the new IT Access List.

Questions or comments about this resource can be directed to CHR@OHR.wisc.edu.