Delivering administrative excellence
The Operational Excellence (OE) Program is a multi-year, multi-project initiative that is building administrative excellence to support UC Berkeley's academic excellence. As mapped below, the OE Program consists of three phases--Diagnostic, Design, and Implementation-- followed by a transition to operations. By employing best practices in project management and other key disciplines and engaging leadership, faculty, staff, and students campus-wide, we are making excellent progress towards achieving our savings goals, building efficient and effective operations, and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement.
Operational Excellence PROGRAM History & Process
The OE Program began in the fall of 2009 with a comprehensive diagnosis of the campus operational and financial environment led by a campus steering committee and facilitated by the outside consultancy Bain & Company. Click here for a copy of the Diagnostic Report produced by Bain & Company. Through this diagnosis, the committee identified several key areas that offer significant opportunities to improve UC Berkeley’s operational effectiveness while reducing the costs of campus operations. Taken together, the committee projected that UC Berkeley could potentially reduce its annual administrative expenses by $100 million; the Chancellor later chartered the effort with a goal of $75 million that leadership judged to be more achieveable.
In April of 2010, the design phase of the OE Program began with the appointment of seven initiative teams, co-sponsored by academic and non-academic campus leaders. The objective of these design teams was to identify, develop, and propose projects that could deliver the efficiencies and operational improvements identified in the Diagnostic Phase. Members of the faculty, along with administrative leaders, served as co-sponsors of each of the seven OE design initiatives and serve on the OE Program Coordinating Committee as well.
Initiative teams completed their design work in winter of 2011 and submitted more than 40 project proposals for consideration. Click here to access documents produced during the Design Phase, including proposal summaries, requests for resources, and business cases for all individual OE Program proposals.
As projects are evaluated and approved, separate teams are formed to coordinate and oversee their implementation. Depending on complexity, the duration of individual project implementations vary from three-to-four months to a few years. As illustrated below, we are well into our implementation phase and projects are successfully transitioning to operations. For a list of OE Program projects and their Implementation status, click here.
Operational Excellence PROGRAM GOVERNANCE
Senior leadership advocacy and support have been and continue to be key to the success of this initiative. The Governance structure consists of a four-member Executive Committee comprised of the Chancellor, the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, the Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance, and the OE Program Faculty Head. The OE Program Coordinating Committee makes recommendations to the Executive Committee and is comprised of faculty and staff leaders of the seven design initiative teams, the Chair of the Academic Senate, and the Presidents of both the Associated Students and the Graduate Student Assembly.
The OE Program Office continues to coordinate and support the activities of OE Program project teams and is headed by Andrew Szeri, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and a member of the faculty of the College of Engineering, who serves as the OE Program Executive Committee Faculty Head.
A CULTURE OF COLLABORATION
Extensive engagement with the campus community – faculty, staff and students –has been a key focus of the Operational Excellence Program. Projects are most likely to succeed when the campus community is actively involved in designing the way in which new processes and systems are integrated into operations. Ongoing feedback from students, faculty and staff helps to ensure continuous improvement of operations, and enables project teams to make course corrections when needed.
- UC Berkeley faculty have been involved from the beginning of the OE Program, serving as sponsors of each of the seven OE Program design initiatives. They are also well represented on the OE Coordinating Committee. In addition, OE project teams and leaders make frequent presentations to faculty leadership groups including the Academic Senate and the Council of Deans.
- More than 200 staff served as volunteers on seven initiative teams; they researched, drafted, and presented design proposals to realize the vision of the OE Program. Additionally, more than 2,000 staff members have participated in OE surveys, focus groups, Town Hall meetings, and Open Houses. Currently, hundreds of campus staff are involved in stakeholder groups, work groups and other teams for specific OE projects, helping to insure that OE projects are responsive to the needs of the campus community.
- UC Berkeley student volunteers served on the diagnostic steering committee, the seven initiative design teams, and the implementation teams. Most impressively, more than one thousand Cal students provided their views to the OE Program Office through surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, and town hall meetings during the design phase. Both the President of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and the President of the Graduate Assembly (GA) are voting members of the OE Coordinating Committee.
Today, all of these stakeholders continue to work collaboratively with both the OE Program Office and individual projects, as their input and feedback is vital to the success of this initiative. A few examples of the ways that individual OE projects are collaborating with the campus community:
- Campus Shared Services Work Groups: More than 19 work groups, made up of staff experts from across campus, work with the CSS team to develop recommendations for process design and other key areas.
- CalTime Local Implementation Leads: A representative from each division on campus was selected to serve as liaison to the CalTime Team, coordinating and helping their division adopt CalTime, building a local team, and communicating any questions, concerns, or suggested improvements from their division.
- CalPlanning Local Implementation Managers (LIMs): To introduce the campus’ new budget and finance system, CalPlanning, a network of finance experts from across campus was developed.
