Process Efficiencies

04/16/19

The Process Efficiencies Initiative (PEI) was established to develop efficient and effective processes to streamline and enhance operations and foster a culture of continuous improvement. The PEI goals, timeline, and other public documents can be found on the PEI website: https://twu.edu/process-efficiencies-initiative/

Our goals are to:

  • Broadly engage the university community in identifying and improving processes, and regularly communicate about the initiative and its results
  • Foster cross-divisional collaboration
  • Build institutional capacity for ongoing, user-centered process improvement
  • Redesign processes to: enhance user experience, reduce process complexity/cost, and/or improve operational efficiency and effectiveness

Current Status

The PEI steering committee is currently in the process of consolidating and rating the 310 process improvement ideas that were submitted. These include non-process suggestions that will be referred to other parts of the university. The committee intends to complete scoring and select processes to improve for this initial phase by mid-April.

Outputs

The PEI initiative has been very active. All work is being collected in a Google Team Drive set up by the Strategic Planning Committee. We have:

  • Formed a steering committee and met four times (plus some additional sub-committee meetings/work)
  • Refined our goals and charge
  • Created a website
  • Developed Guiding Principles for process improvement
  • Developed Selection Criteria to help evaluate & prioritize improvement ideas
  • Drafted success metrics for the initiative
  • Issued a call for ideas (via email) and collected 310 submissions from students, faculty, and staff
  • Consolidated the 310 submissions into 85 unique processes and 65 non-process suggestions

Next Steps

The PEI steering committee will finish reviewing and scoring the submissions and will select those which will be tackled in this initial phase of the initiative, based on the committee's selection criteria (low-hanging fruit, biggest impact, etc). Once processes are selected, working groups will be formed to tackle process mapping and (re)design. We will host a 3-day process improvement training workshop the week of June 3, 2019, for working group members to receive hands-on training on how to tackle process improvement, working with their group on their specific process.

For more information, contact initiative champions Raechelle Clemmons or Jason Tomlinson.

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Written by the Strategic Plan Design Team