Advancing Your Career: Business Process Improvement
In November’s Your Questions Answered, SRAI Distinguished Faculty answered, “What activities or strategies have you undertaken that has helped you advance in your career?” In this article, Associate VP Jason Guilbeault takes a closer look at how business process improvements impacted his career and shares some tips for implementation.
I credit my advancement, at a younger age than most, to an Associate VP at a mid-sized medical university and as a distinguished faculty member in SRAI to the many business process improvements I’ve made at my current and previous places of employment, which included my tenure as a full-time consultant. These skills are in high demand, and the improvements are great to put on a resume or cover letter. I always start by trying to find better and more efficient ways to do my job, which had the additional benefit of allowing me more free time to learn other positions’ duties, improve those processes, and serve on cross functional committees to learn more about other parts of the organization.
Being knowledgeable in other parts of your organization allows you to understand stakeholders’ concerns and the potential impacts that one process change can have on others. It helps you strategize how you’re going to market your process changes to get buy-in from key stakeholders. Anyone can read and interpret rules and regulations, but how you operationalize those rules and regulations into efficient processes is key to reducing administrative burden across your organization. In today’s environment of tight labor markets, staff turnover, and lack of administrative support, being efficient is a necessity for continuity of business operations and maintaining compliance.
Where do we start with business process improvement, and how do we know which processes to fix? What I’ve found most helpful is communicating with different stakeholder groups, including my own office, to help identify opportunities for improvement and areas where people are struggling to complete tasks. Below are some of my tips when identifying and fixing processes, though I’ll note that this is a central Sponsored Programs Office perspective:
- If you find you need to repeatedly teach people the same thing several times, it could be because the process is not intuitive and user friendly (don’t be too quick to blame the learner). Design processes, forms, checklists, etc., so that end users can easily follow, and create clear instructions for people to follow. I’ve gone so far as to shadow department administrators trying to complete certain tasks so I can pinpoint the disconnect, or at least write useful instructions.
- Have a consistent process and workflow that captures over 95% of scenarios and handle the one-offs as they come. As a former full-time consultant, I’ve seen a lot of processes with too much process variability and workflows that create too many bottlenecks because we’re trying to account for every possible scenario and appease every stakeholder, so we’re very flexible to our own detriment. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a statistician, said that “uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality” and I couldn’t agree more.
- Listen to the complaints about the processes that cause irritation both in your own office and with your researchers and department administrators. You may be surprised at how easy some of these problems are to fix.
- Identify tasks where the ball seemingly gets dropped all the time. You may have poor tracking systems which can lead to late no-cost extensions, or forget to request the carryforward that’s not automatic, and many other missed tasks that are easily tracked. Sometimes preventing tasks from falling through the cracks is the major improvement which indirectly saves time later.
- Ask: What are some of the processes that take up so much of our time? In other words, why does it take so long to do X? Shaving 15 – 30 minutes off a process that your office does hundreds, maybe thousands, of times per year can lead to a large reduction in workload in your office.
- Ask: Are we duplicating processes and approvals amongst ourselves?
- Ask: Where do the rules say we must do things a certain way? Many rules tell you what compliance objective to meet, but not how to do it. Take advantage of that flexibility.
Authored by Jason Guilbeault, MBA, CRA, Associate Vice President for Sponsored Programs Administration, Executive Director for Augusta University Research Institute
Augusta University
SRAI Distinguished Faculty
#December2023