Removing Barriers Will Improve Process
How do you get work done? What methods do you employ on a regular basis to reliably achieve your short-term goals? What kind of service do you prefer when you are the customer? Take a step back from your routine and examine your institutions' processes through the eyes of your students and employees. What can be done to remove barriers and make your processes easier for everyone?
Get Up and Move
With the advent of wearable technology, a number of organizations have introduced fitness challenges, leveraging the personal activity trackers worn by employees. For a period of a few weeks, a challenge is issued to the members of the organization, and participants that register link their device to a company portal that is dedicated to tracking performance. Statistics are aggregated and rankings within the organization are then calculated in near-real time. The intent is to encourage competition among employees in a goal to be the most active. This naturally has the added benefit of promoting an awareness of making healthier choices during the workday.
Now imagine if the challenge lasted more than just a few weeks. What impact might that have on the culture and the overall business environment?
Why shouldn't organizations encourage more movement within the organization during the work week? For those that do move about, the opportunities for greater collaboration are just a few steps away. A number of Silicon Valley companies have created campuses with spaces designed intentionally as collision points between different divisions, fostering interactions and connections between staff that might not naturally work together. Pixar's campus features an atrium that specifically encourages unplanned collaborations between employees from across the organization.
As leaders, we should encourage a culture of movement and connections, reward autonomy, and allow our teams the flexibility in their schedules that match the way that best suits their peak times of productivity. In return, and if mentored, they will reward the business with laser focus and help create a balance in their availability and attention to customers and a commitment to important projects and tasks.
As campus administrators, we had a practice in our office of assigning one member of the team a list of places on campus to visit and the technologies to check. The assignment rotated weekly. Given the size of our department, each individual might receive the task three or four times a year at most. The punch list included checking printers and computer labs, televisions in high-profile locations, registers in the dining halls, wireless connections in academic spaces, and any space that featured technology generally found along a typical campus tour route. Basically, anything that was managed by IT was placed on the list. It was our approach to management by walking around.
The stereotype that most technologists in Information Technology have is one of an introverted hermit, crouched behind a desk in a low lit back office watching reruns of Battlestar Galactica. We broke that stereotype, and in return, we took a proactive approach to integrating our services across the institution. What our team learned in the process was that the more they moved about, the more integrated they became with the culture on campus. Staff members that had received assistance in the past would stop to say, "Thank you." Often, our team would return with ideas from conversations that they'd had with peers around campus, as well as requests for additional services. By being out on the front lines and listening to our users, our team was able to offer better customer service than had ever been delivered in the past.
Higher education institutions have a chance to do what others in business have already figured out. Management by walking about is just one way to influence a change in culture. Other opportunities may arise when considering the redesign of a space on campus or a new construction project. Imagine bringing forward a design that abandons discipline-centricity and encourages collisions between the faculty in, say, the marketing department, with students taking digital design courses. Shouldn't mathematicians be afforded an opportunity to interact with academics from the physics department?
These unscripted interactions could ultimately bring about important changes to academic fields and the paths that faculty and students may choose to follow in the future. But first, we must take the opportunity to be intentional with how the organization perceives movement.
Ideas Are Environmental
Last week, there was news that Elon Musk responded to an idea from a 5th grader that he received via Twitter. In a re-paste of a letter that she wrote to the founder of Tesla, the girl's father shared his daughter's message with the entrepreneur. Musk then responded, noting that his company would take action and make the idea happen.
Ideas are not individual, but they are environmental. Just as we move with a wave in the ocean, we are rocked back and forth by influences that are stronger than our individual mode of function. That which you believe is 100% original is created through thousands of interactions with hundreds of people dozens of times.
The day we start believing we are the sole provider of creativity is the day we have allowed our egos to surpass prudence. From that day forward we will dismiss the creations of those around us as being nothing but a product of our own, when in reality the reverse is true.
You don’t have to follow this advice to succeed as a leader. Many who have long abandoned caring for the source of creative advancements have indeed succeeded. The pitfall in believing in egocentric self-reliance is the inevitable disintegration of the team that truly delivered collective creativity, as no team can be stable without an understanding of this simple concept:
We are nothing but a part of the creative process and we must not only play our part, but understand the importance of the parts others play.
As mentioned previously, leaders who ignore this fact may indeed succeed, but only temporarily. After the team disintegration takes hold, such leaders tend to find themselves unable to move the business left or right, and often get frustrated with the process.
As a leader, if you have built a winning team, keep the following simple script in mind:
Dream
Create
Recognize
Listen
Start Over
Being a leader means that you are perfectly poised to do that which others can’t do, and that is to dream. Just as any famous band has a front man without whom they would be playing in a garage, every business has the need for you because you have the capability of moving people and dreaming with balance and purpose.
The creation process will be accomplished by those on the team that create. As a leader, open space and enjoy the process, while maintaining a full understanding of the collective experience. The creators can push the foundation and practice forward.
After every element of your dream has been realized through the creative process, recognize those who have created alongside you. Please realize that you are not doing this for your team, but it is an exercise to keep you grounded on what is actually happening.
One you have started winning, your team will be empowered to think beyond the “now,” and you should give it a good listen. They will give you fuel so that you may dream further.
Like any good framework, repeat the process and start over.
On college campuses, ideas come from everywhere. In our years in higher education, we've seen it firsthand. Conversations with cafeteria workers about long lines during peak meal times resulted in how classes were scheduled to help alleviate stress in the facilities. Landscape crews that noted wear and tear on certain pathways across campus resulted in paving new sidewalks between academic buildings. Observations of student traffic patterns by library staff influenced how common areas and seating were rearranged in order to afford students greater access to the resources needed for their research and foster collaboration.
Ideas can come from anywhere. Institutions just need to be mindful of the collective wisdom and intelligence that makes their institutions great, and welcome ideas as an extension of the campus culture. Place suggestion boxes throughout the campus, and launch an online presence to elicit feedback. When a recommendation is brought forward that presents a solution to a known issue, reward that idea by putting it into action and promote it.
Ideas are environmental. Create an environment and culture that helps ideas become reality.
Improve the Budget Culture
Wireless network connections are simply a natural extension of any household or corporate infrastructure. These connections have the potential to free us from our physical surroundings and continue our conversations and productivity regardless of a floor plan.
Now, imagine for a moment that if every time you needed to go online or make a phone call, you had to sit down at a desk and tether yourself to a network jack.
That wouldn't fly anymore, would it? No. That is because in business and throughout society, we've moved beyond the need to remain stationary in order to harness a connection to the Internet, and we now communicate freely whenever and wherever we need to go.
So why should Higher Education be immune to progress?
Using this analogy, why then do institutions continue to approach their budgeting in such an arcane manner? When the time comes to begin the budgeting process, every office requesting funds ends up passing around multiple versions of the same spreadsheet, emailing a copy of their edits to the Business Office, only to have another team consolidate each individual entry into a single, aggregated spreadsheet by hand? This process continues until each office has completed their budget. Once the institution's budget is ready for review by a larger audience, the process then repeats. It makes no sense! It may be one of the most inefficient practices in higher education today, and yet it's the same on the majority of campuses with whom we have worked.
Institutions need a new approach to one of its most critical business functions. In order to address mounting concerns over retention and focus more on student success and learning outcomes, schools must spend less time on the budgeting process and spend more time focusing on what matters most in higher education: its students.
Interfacing vs. Integrating
Speak with almost any campus technologist in higher education today about how a chosen system is employed and how end-users interact with it, and the answer will likely be the same: product X meets the needs of their office and serves a specific function, but ultimately there's a weakness when it comes to natively combining the information it provides with other processes for their department. Sharing data is often a manual and time consuming process.
The concept that System A integrates with System B (new or existing) requires much more internal coordination than simply tying interfaces together logically. Even if one system can generate the necessary data elements and a second system consume the data, how does one make the determination that the two systems are "integrated?"
It takes a broader conversation to ensure that each office or department on campus that relies on each system has agreed to follow specific workflows to ensure that data in System A clearly represents how data in System B is used and vice versa. Often, integration efforts fall short in execution if changes to process are required or if business rules are not made clear to every user that interacts with each system.
Satellite applications often only provide data in silos. In such cases, these applications are more likely to present information than offer insight. However, if business process consciously drives integration, the opportunity to augment how an institution functions has a much greater chance to succeed. Any project that focuses first on the business use cases to help drive deep integration will always be more successful than one that simply stands up a system in a vacuum.
Momentum Matters
Your control of your own productivity is only partially determined by your current determination to “get something done”. To a large extent, your capability to deliver with speed and quality depends on your momentum. If you have built momentum in the direction of being 'unproductive,' your week will drag on, and you will accomplish nothing. Conversely, if you have built momentum in the direction of action and a disciplined delivery, nothing will stop you. Don’t ever attribute that flow to chance. If you want to excel, then you must have the discipline to start building momentum towards productivity now.
Process Improvement
Colleges are hard to maneuver, and the internal processes that may seem obvious and logical to those involved with their designs often end up abandoned for reasons beyond anyone’s control. The "purging" process is a great example of one such problem that affects institutions deeply in a place where some need it most: the bottom line of their budget.
Usually, right around this time of the year, colleges will drop students who are not "paid in full" for the fall term. That process forces administrators to make gut wrenching decisions to enforce college policy, while sometimes watching millions of dollars disappear from the balance sheets. Rules must be followed and students must pay, but HOW an institution decides to handle this process will determine its short and mid-term success or failure.
By following this type of process, students are dropped from classes and their enrollment is cancelled, which then results in a barrage of calls from students attempting to re-establish their status with the college. However, paying is just one little part of the process. Students who have been dropped will then have to re-register and perform many other tasks just to return their status with the institution to a working order. Students' schedules will no longer match their expected schedules with no little to no notice, and they will have to invest additional time and effort just to return to full matriculation status. Institutions would argue that students failed to follow the process, and ultimately, the onus is on the student to follow through. But sometimes, the students just make a mistake. The larger question becomes, Do you want those students enrolled at your institution? If the answer is yes, and we expect it is, it is in your best interest to handle them with care. Here is a list of what you should consider:
Don’t drop students who owe you less than $500.00.
Don’t drop students at all! Apply a fake drop to students or set a deadline prior to the real deadline and make it look like you dropped them. Those interested in returning will call you, and when they pay, their courses and statuses are back just like they were before.
Don’t use email. Use text messages to communicate the urgency of the need. Handle it as you would an emergency.
Resist every tendency to treat students in default as second-class students. They are your students and they need help.
Resist those who tell you that dropping students for non-payment is part of their education. Education is expensive and writing big checks is scary. Students (and parents) will delay it as much as they can.
We've seen many college professionals love the ideas listed above, but not act. That usually happens because no one feels that this is within the capabilities of their area, and the idea evaporates. On the flip side, however, we have been part of teams where offices and decision makers work closely to serve every student, and the actions related to these practices paid handsomely.
We encourage you to pay close attention to this process, and save your institution from missing on an opportunity to retain students who simply need a nudge. They are worth it.
Remove the Dust of Custom
While running errands this week, I caught a portion of a podcast - On Being.The featured guest was poet Gregory Orr, and between stops at the grocery store and Home Depot, I heard him read a poem that resonated with me.
This particular stanza from Orr’s poem "Let’s Remake the World with Words" got my attention.
Let’s,
As Wordsworth said, remove
“The dust of custom” so things
Shine again, each object arrayed
In its robe of original light.
How can we remove ‘the dust of custom,’ in our working lives? How can we improve our services and resources so that the purpose for which they were originally created is again clear or improved? We have to do some housekeeping.
Higher ed is really good at doing things the way we’ve always done them. Why? Well, sometimes we know the answer to that question, and sometimes when that question is posed, it hangs in the air, and we can’t come up with the answer.
That’s how we’ve always done it.
That’s how we typically do it.
That’s how I was taught to do it.
We are all guilty of uttering these phrases, of getting so accustomed to the way things are done that we forget to stretch, to look at things from a new perspective. We become complacent.
A look at the website of many colleges will tell you just that. Instead of leading, engaging, and connecting with potential students, college sites often look like dumping grounds for every bit of information we’ve ever known. And, somewhere in the middle of all that text, the message gets lost.
Granted, some of the noise is impossible to remove. It’s the institutional-speak we must include. The policies and procedures are uninteresting and dry, but essential nonetheless.
But the vast majority of content on a typical college website can be tweaked. Thinning content, updating information, and checking for ADA compliance is not a fun job. It’s arduous, tedious work. Still, it’s so important to constantly improve what is likely the first impression a potential student may have of your school.
Every college has room to dust off their customary processes and resources. The key is to have it reviewed with fresh eyes.
When undergoing a website overhaul, we suggest asking the really important stakeholders: potential students. Have them apply, find information about financial aid, or look for program information. Soon, you’ll know what information is unclear or clunky. Also, ask other departments what questions they hear from students most often. This can be the starting point for a task-driven, engaging site.
This approach can also be used to improve any number of other processes, resources or collateral pieces.
I tried this at a college I worked at years ago. I asked all the front-line staff to tell me the most common question they received from students. What I soon learned was that there were no restroom signs in one of our buildings. I had worked in and around that facility for years, and hadn’t noticed myself.
We challenge our clients to take a fresh look at their processes. Identify and listen to stakeholders, let them weigh in, and then take what you hear and apply it to your purpose. Some ideas will be useless, but some ideas might just spark an idea that will help you breathe new life into a process or resource that has been neglected for years, covered in dust.
Stability in Motion
One morning last week, I was invited to join a friend for a paddling trip out on the water. Rather than take my kayak, I decided that I would try my hand on his extra stand-up paddleboard. (Paddleboarding is very popular in and around the area in which we live, and so I felt like it was only a matter of time until I gave it an honest try.)
The stand-up paddleboard requires a much different approach than most other board related activities. Skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding all require similar postures, foot positioning and balance techniques. On a stand-up paddleboard, however, the feet are spread across the board, and the individual stands facing forward. The stance also requires a different balance technique, as the emphasis is not placed on heel-to-toe control.
It was the first time I actually thought about how to maintain stability in motion. The other board sports that I've participated in for years came natural; this was something new, and it required a lot of focus to adjust and remain upright. The consequences of losing focus and balance would result in falling into shallow winter waters over jagged oyster beds.
Maintaining stability in motion takes practice, in your daily activities as well as in business. The external factors that can derail our focus are as present on the water as they are in the office. Whereas on the water, winds, wakes and tides can work against the casual sportsman, making it difficult to remain atop the board, it is just as easy to become distracted at work, too. Depending on where you might sit in the organizational structure, distractions can come from a variety of sources: emails, meetings, pet projects, and other random requests and activities that don't actually move the business any closer to its goals (but somehow keep you "busy").
Because of such factors, the art of maintaining balance in business requires that each member of the team consider the view of the business through a customer lens, an ownership lens, and an employee lens. It is the overlap between the three that create the balance every business needs to continue on its path towards success.
Stability requires balance and focus. Cut down the communication channels, create a list of the most critical items that need to be completed, and move forward. All other requests will simply rock your paddleboard.
What Are You Paying For?
Higher Education budgets are inherently complicated - multiple fund sources, hundreds of accounts, and lots of budget managers whose roles change often make the budget picture at most colleges and universities murky at best.
Even when budget managers are engaged and actively trying to both understand their budget and use it efficiently, the process of accounting for every single line item can be daunting.
Shifts in budget management are especially challenging.
A new budget manager may not be familiar with all the expenses for which they’ve been asked to pay, and often reorganizations within the college structure can leave some expenses lost in transition, with budget managers unintentionally renewing software or services that might be obsolete or underused.
So, what are you paying for?
We suggest that budget managers review the following expenses that may go overlooked or be auto-renewed as they plan for the new budget cycle.
Software
Aging software may become obsolete, be available in newer versions, or be charged on a per seat basis (i.e. number of users).
Examine software expenditures for the following:
What version are you paying for and is it the most current?
Are you paying for a certain number of seats for the software? If so, do you still need as many?
When was the last time you negotiated the pricing of each product?
Auto-renewals
Look at the terms of your contracts.
What is the renewal period?
How much notice must you give to cancel a contract?
Is there an opportunity to negotiate rates for extended years of service?
Discover what's not working
Are there items on your budget that were great in theory, but have been tough to implement in the way they were intended?
Review each expense and its purpose
Site the details of its use. Who uses this product/service and why? To what end?
Determine if the product/service is providing the results for which it was intended and if the price for the product/service is justified
Evaluating budget line items for the value they bring to your institution may not only save money, but free up funds for new projects ahead.
The Conventional Wisdom of Remaining the Same
I often read documents that preach how IT operations should push the business structure to minimize customizations. I understand their motivation and the conventional wisdom related to the reduction of cost. However, I do disagree wholeheartedly with the conclusion.
There is a lot of talk about how IT has finally reached its position as a strategic partner with the business it serves because of a new focus on analytics. Analytics will allow businesses to make smart decisions, and it is very, very important. But so is the customization of software offerings.
Consider the following:
Just yesterday, one of my friends purchased new beach chairs, from his beach chair, at the beach, using his phone. Hello, Amazon Prime, here we come! Analytics will inform Amazon of national trends on purchase of beach chairs, as well as what else my friend is likely to purchase. However, the reason they have his business, and the subsequent data, and other people’s data is not because of analytics. It is because of process. Amazon invented the one-click purchase, and they made the online shopping experience great. Then they instituted Amazon Prime, pushed the phone experience, and changed retail: each of their services hinge on process. What the articles I read fail to mention is how the operational side of IT is just as much a part of strategy as analytics. Together, strategy and meaningful data must walk hand in hand.
Furthermore, the phone company has successfully convinced him to pay much more for his service than the trend had indicated prior to 2009. Phone service was getting cheaper and cheaper, long distance charges were dying a slow death, and company rates were on a race to the bottom. A regular household paid the phone company approximately $15.00 per month for a single dedicated line. Now we pay almost $150.00 per month for service and $600.00 for the actual phone, and yet we can’t live without it. As most of us have some type of internet service at home, we end up paying twice for internet access, month after month. This is the second piece of the puzzle that allowed my friend to buy his chairs at the beach yesterday, and it is all related to PROCESS.
Analytics will bring intelligence, but innovation comes from thinking differently and operating differently from your competitors. As long as you try to fit your operation to the software, rather than the software to your operation, you will -- by default --operate just like your competitors, and you will stifle innovation within your operation.
In higher education, the discussion is the same. I have spent ten years of my life customizing IT services to a business that was fixated on delivering unsurpassed customer service. At my last institution, our processes -- not the software -- defined our differentiation, and our clients rewarded us handsomely in return.
What’s In It For the Student?
Campus leadership often asks, how do we encourage more students to complete a set of measurable tasks? With the rise of mobile devices in the hands of its students in recent years, that answer has been to make it into a game! Gamification has risen in popularity in education today because of its perceived viral appeal, but it has an archenemy, which we call “single dimensional thinking.” If you think gamification of anything will coerce students to behave a certain way, you may be subject to single dimensional thinking. A game is irrelevant without serving as the front-end for something that students want. The most important thing an institution can do for a project is to ask, “Why would students care?”
A couple of weeks ago, I spent time with the CEO of Untapped, a very successful mobile app business that has made tasting different beers into a game. The platform includes encouraging social interactions and receiving various badges of achievement. While Untapped is wildly successful, its success didn’t come until their app became a game for its users. The craft brewing business in the US is booming in part because people love tasting a variety of beers crafted by different artisans. By attaching challenges to the enjoyment of tasting beers, a game-based task feels less like a chore and more of a memorable record of that fun.
Ignoring the game that you may or may not create for a moment, what it is that will make your students WANT to use your gamified app or program? In other words, what is in it for them? Answering this question is central to the success of your next project and to understanding the value proposition that entices your audience to participate.
As an example, FundFive is in the middle of proposing a project to gamify a student process for a potential client. When we ask the question, “What is in this for the student?” we face the reality that the answer is “Nothing.”
The lack of a value proposition posed an obvious challenge to the mobile app’s success, and so we began to dig deeper. In response, we modified the original request of the client to include the capability for students to create a co-curricular transcript using their phone. Now, in addition to completing the requirements for a badge, students can use the same app to add an activity to their personal transcript that can also be referenced later.
Every student wants to receive credit for what they are involved with on campus (and not just academics). Whether the student spends time tutoring other peers in mathematics, serves on the leadership board with a campus organization, or dedicates service hours on the weekend at a local soup kitchen, every experience shapes the individual and the person that they are when they graduate. By providing the student with a platform to track their experiences via an app (and even compete with others on campus within their cohort), the app instantly becomes relevant. That is the true value proposition behind gamification and how to make an app attractive to students today.
Each institution will have to uncover the answers about “relevance” based on its own profile and set of characteristics. Once it breaks free from single dimensional thinking, its chances of succeeding will dramatically increase.
When the Rubber Meets the Road
When the time comes to run a marathon, will all of the training be enough to carry you across the finish line? Did all of the countless hours spent practicing the piano prepare you for the annual recital? When a massive power outage affects the campus and systems go offline, will the disaster recovery plan that you worked months to create be dependable and help your team restore services quickly?
Will you be ready to perform when the time comes to deliver? Preparations are critical for the challenges we will face in our personal and professional lives.
You wouldn't register for a 26.2 mile race without having ever laced up a pair of running shoes, and the chances of sitting down at a piano with little practice and playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 are slim without the proper preparation.
What good is a disaster recovery plan if it's never been tested? How can you ensure that the processes will work as documented and that the teams will be prepared? You must document and communicate the plan, and then schedule a test event and force the systems into a disaster-like scenario. Following the evaluation of the plan, schedule a hot wash exercise to walk through the findings with each of the teams responsible for ensuring business continuity, and then communicate to the impacted areas of the business with the information necessary for maintaining order in the wake of a major outage.