October 4, 2001
Support services improved, deans say
UW deans are more satisfied with support services than they were two years ago, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. That’s the conclusion of a review that was completed recently.
The review, sponsored by the President and coordinated through Executive Vice President Weldon Ihrig’s office, was conducted by Ruth Johnston, assistant controller of Student Fiscal Services and associate treasurer in Financial Management Administration. It consisted of a paper survey and interviews with all the deans on campus, as well as the chancellors of Bothell and Tacoma – 22 people in all.
“In the interviews, we didn’t ask them about specific services,” Johnston said. “We simply asked them what things were working well and what services needed improvement.”
This is the second such review to be conducted; the first was in 1999. That was a year, Johnston says, in which several new deans had arrived at the UW from outside and had had difficulty navigating the system to get the services they needed. They brought their concerns to the President, who asked Ihrig to look into the situation. He in turn arranged for Johnston to conduct the review.
That first review, according to Johnston, was mainly the deans’ voices. This time, however, deans were given the opportunity to invite relevant support staff to the interviews, and many of them did so. “These are often the people who actually interact with the support services, so it was helpful to hear from them too,” Johnston said.
The good news of the survey is that the deans are happier with services than they were at the time of the last review. In fact, only two of the recent interviews were characterized as generally negative, compared to eight such interviews two years ago. Among the improvements cited was a better “customer service attitude” on campus.
“Many of the people I spoke with feel as though there’s a greater responsiveness, a greater willingness to try to find the answer, more of a smile in the voice when somebody answers the phone,” Johnston said.
Or, as one dean put it, “We get fewer bureaucratic answers.”
Deans also cited increased cross-campus collaboration that one official called “encouraging and exciting.”
“A lot of the central services have tried to solicit input from their customers as they design and revise procedures,” Johnston said. “Probably the most cited instance of this was the USER project. The deans were very positive about that.”
(The USER Project was created to streamline business operations and to make information readily available to members of the campus community when and where they need it. A unique component of the project is that its online products are created by teams of end users.)
Many units – too many to list them all – were singled out for praise. Human Resources, for example, received high ratings and was described as “totally transformed” by a number of those interviewed. HR did not receive good ratings in the original review.
“(Current Vice President for Human Resources) Karen Kavanagh was just coming in at the time of the first review, so she immediately knew what some of the problems were,” Johnston said.
The fact that HR went from high criticism to high praise is emblematic of how the first review was received, Johnston said. “I didn’t see a high level of defensiveness. I saw more an ‘OK, this is what we need to focus on,’ which I think is healthy.”
Ihrig said many many of the areas criticized in the first review were already in the process of being improved. “However,” he added, “we did place greater focus on further improving client services as well as speeding up the work to modernize how we provide support services using Web technologies.” Ihrig also distributed a report – first quarterly and then twice a year – to deans, telling them about improvements that had been made.
There are a number of units that receive criticism in the current report, however. One, the Capital Projects Office, has recently acquired a new associate vice president, Richard Chapman, who, according to Johnston, was recruited with the idea that his skills would help address the issues that were brought up.
Several others, including Purchasing and Publications Services, fall under another fairly recent hire, Associate Vice President for Business Services Sandra Lier. Lier has launched a new system, called the Balanced Score Card, that she hopes will make a difference in the way those units interact with their customers.
“The Balanced Scorecard is a management tool used to align and link resources with strategies, keeping in mind a balance in four areas – financial, people, process and the community we serve,” Lier said. “We are beginning to analyze what we do and are using client feedback and analysis to improve.” A report of the Business Services retreat at which plans were made can be found at http://www.washington.edu/admin/business/framework.html.
Another outcome of the review is that the UW Yellow Pages, launched in response to the first review, will be transformed into more customer service oriented Web pages on the Faculty and Staff Guide. The Yellow Pages were intended as a means of categorizing and listing resources available according to the services provided rather than the office that provided them. The feeling is now, Johnston says, that the pages have served their purpose as a catalyst for this kind of categorization and don’t need to continue as a separate entity.
The original review was well received by the Board of Regents, and President Richard L. McCormick has called for similar reviews to be conducted once a biennium.
Johnston says such reviews are not common in higher education. “Higher ed. likes to study other people but not itself,” she said. “So I would think our president would be seen as both courageous and avant garde for doing this. It’s a really healthy thing to do, as long as it’s seen as an opportunity for improvement rather than the blame game.”
Ihrig is also pleased with the reviews. “Feedback is always important to improving services,” he said. “While each of our units gets feedback, this overall approach conducted independently and well publicized helps each of us really measure whether we are doing the right things, and allows us to recalibrate in cases where we need to be more responsive. The information is even more important when the University is facing budget cuts.”
The full report of the review is available at http://www.washington.edu/president/evp/ssa/.
