Experts help find solutions to problems identified by administrative project

The next phase of the campus’s broad-based effort to improve business practices and provide customer satisfaction is under way, with guidance and training from a corps of campus experts.

“We have brought people together from across campus to identify problems, and now we’re using campus experts to train us to find the solutions,” says Alice Gustafson, leader of the Administrative Process Redesign (APR) project.

APR has partnered with Scott Converse and Bob Shaver, of the School of Business’s Executive Education unit, and Carl Vieth, of the College of Engineering’s Department of Engineering Professional Development, to provide specialized training in performance improvement.

The project has also benefited from the expertise offered by the Office of Quality Improvement.

“It’s an organic, collaborative way for us to work out these problems and provide state-of-the-art training that will help APR sustain itself in years to come,” Gustafson adds.

APR was designed to bring people together to build new, streamlined administrative systems based on campus needs, best practices and data analysis.

As part of the process, process teams spent several months identifying broken business practices. Now, redesign teams will tackle the assignment of finding solutions.

Six training projects were chosen for redesign in first phase. The scope of the projects is continuing to evolve.

Three redesign teams are examining separate, but related, issues with new, transferring and exiting employees and their access to computer, security and technology systems. All of the projects aim to increase efficiency and productivity.

One team is working on having all new employees having access to key systems on the first day they report for work; another is looking at easing the transition for employees who transfer on campus; and a third is assessing ways to make it easier to smooth the system for departing employees.

Two other teams are developing better ways for units to track gift fund accounts with the University of Wisconsin Foundation. One team is looking at ways to iron out accounting and system wrinkles to allow for reporting of gift fund balances in a more timely, comprehensive way.

Another team is working to reduce the time from when a department requests funds, and when it receives them. Another redesign team is trying to find way to reduce the amount of time required to complete sub-agreements that are often required with other universities, government agencies or foreign entities when the university receives a research grant.

Converse, Vieth and Shaver have conducted a seven-day training program with key individuals and have offered an abbreviated, half-day session to provide a primer to their methods — sometimes referred to in industry as Lean Six Sigma — in addition to other process improvement skills and change management concepts.

The idea behind the concept is to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects. Converse says finding a solution depends on using data to target the solution.

“You think you know what the problem is and you fire off a solution right away,” he says. “But if you don’t hit the root cause, it’ll come back right away. We’re trying to teach a process-improvement recipe.”

Vieth says improving processes involves the understanding and management of variability — because every customer is different. Since service organizations deal with customers, rather than machines or parts, as in manufacturing, that variability is heightened.

Understanding customers and their values and managing the change that comes with reforming processes are two of the system’s underlying principles, Vieth says.

“Until we start looking at how we impact our customers, we’re not going to make any headway on improvement,” Vieth says. “And the toughest thing in process improvement is managing change. If you’ve ever had a spectacular failure in a project, it’s usually because you failed to manage change.”

Vieth says change does not take place based on wishes and whims, but based on careful planning.

Gustafson says Vieth, Converse and Shaver have been crucial in training teams members in performance improvement techniques.

“By spreading the knowledge of these techniques on campus, we’re planting the seeds for positive change — for us and for our customers,” she says. “We’re using the project to improve what we do on a daily basis, and fundamentally alter the way we tackle problems in the future.”

Next Campus Forums Set

Overview, presentation and Q&A:

• Friday, April 18, 8:30–10 a.m. Ebling Symposium Center Microbial Sciences
• Wednesday, April 23, 2:30–4 p.m. Great Hall, Memorial Union