June 27, 2002
Farewell, Operations Manual
If you have a two-volume UW Operations Manual in your office, Rebecca Deardorff has a message for you: Get rid of it.
“The material in the Operations Manual hasn’t been updated since December of 1999,” Deardorff says. “If you go by what’s in it, you have a good chance of being wrong.”
As a matter of fact, the venerable Operations Manual, the Bible on how things get done at the University for at least 30 years, is going the way of the dinosaurs. The thick set of policies and procedures is being replaced by a smaller piece called Administrative Policy Statements, with a lot of material moving from paper to the Web.
The change is part of an effort to streamline the way the University keeps track of and distributes its official policies. Deardorff is head of the Administrative Procedures Office, which oversees that process. For years, whenever any change was made in policies or procedures, the office responsible reported the change to Deardorff, who saw to it that every office involved in the implementation of that policy or procedure had a chance to review it. Each was subject to approval by various officials, depending on the subject matter.
“It’s a cumbersome process, rightly so for policies,” Deardorff said, “but it was really overkill for procedures, which often involve simply a change in a form, or a move to a new office.”
As a result, the successor to the Operations Manual contains policies but not procedures. Policy changes will still be subject to the full review process, but procedures can be changed by the offices that oversee them without a review. And the offices that administer procedures will be responsible for publishing and updating them. This material will, for the most part, be on the Web.
The Administrative Procedures Office, meanwhile, will publish Administrative Policy Statements both in notebook form and on the Web. The Web version will contain many links to related procedures.
“We will keep both the paper and the Web versions updated, but the Web version will be updated much more frequently,” Deardorff said. “A policy will be updated on the Web within a week of final approval. The paper update will depend upon when we have the funds to do it.”
Although the move to the Web has many advantages, it does have one disadvantage for users. In the past, Deardorff explained, users received a notice when a policy was changed.
“For many people, it was receiving the notice and putting the new version of the policy in the notebook that called their attention to it,” she says. “Now, people are simply going to have to check the Web every time they have to reference the policy to make sure they are using the latest version.”
The old Operations Manual was part of a set of materials that made up Reference Stations, located in more than 400 areas on campus. The Administrative Procedures Office distributed the Washington Administrative Code and the University Handbook at reference stations along with the Operations Manual. Other Reference Station items came from different offices. Now, Deardorff says, the number of Reference Stations is going to be dramatically reduced.
“We’ll make sure there are paper versions of the Administrative Policy Statements, the Washington Administrative Code and the University Handbook for the president, the deans, the provost and vice presidents,” Deardorff said. “And there will be hard copies in the libraries as well as for those staff who don’t have easy access to the Web.”
Deardorff said the day may come when all the materials her office oversees will be on the Web only, but that the present system is an intermediate step. It also safeguards the materials in the event of a major computer meltdown.
She notes the irony in the fact that an office called Administrative Procedures has washed its hands of procedures in favor of dealing with policies only. But the office’s name is an artifact of history, she says. It came into existence as a result of the Washington State Administrative Procedure Act, which requires all public institutions to have an office dealing with rules coordination.
“That mission hasn’t changed,” Deardorff said. “But we live in a different world now. The days when you turn to a notebook sitting in your office to find the latest policies are over.”
