Stop Treading Water: Reinvent Your Business Processes

Have you ever asked a staff member why they did their job a certain way? Often, the response is, “Well, that’s the way we have always done it!” Over the years, our business processes typically change to solve specific problems or issues that happened to a student or parent, even if they only happened once. When such situations happen repeatedly over several semesters, processes can become extremely cumbersome and inefficient. Consequently, many of our processes become a product of “minor fixes” leading to laborious and expensive inefficiencies.

Follow-up questions for the staff members should review documentation for a particular process. Many times, the responses may be “what documentation?” or “the documentation is so old that it is useless.”

To complicate matters further, the college experience has dramatically changed over time. The days of offering student services, from our perspective, by independent functional areas (functional silos) frustrate students who are looking for integrated student support service models. This is especially true when a process cuts across functional offices and students must navigate (physically or virtually) from office to office to resolve a problem. Students are attending our institutions to gain skills and knowledge — not to learn how to navigate administrative functions across multiple disconnected offices in our campus.

If our current processes lack documentation and no one has assessed them for efficiency and effectiveness, we must stop treading water! It is time to initialize a project to evaluate and document our business processes, focusing on process analysis, and beginning by conducting process mapping sessions.

Process Mapping is a tool used to determine how a process works in practice, from start to finish, with an aim toward identifying and implementing solutions to improve the efficiency and/or effectiveness of that process. During process mapping, the focus is on the flow of work and people through different work areas and departments and the value each subsequent step in the process adds to the final product created or service provided.

As a valuable process analysis methodology, process mapping can be an integral part of process improvement efforts or of business process engineering (BPR) initiatives. Process improvement is appropriate when an organization is addressing relatively minor quality or efficiency improvements to an existing process; BPR is appropriate when an organization is pursuing more radical improvements to a process.

Let’s look at the typical organizational landscape found in most institutions. A traditional hierarchical structure identifies offices (departments) performing functions bound by their departments.

The graphic above depicts functional offices (sometimes called functional silos) where “Function 1” may represent the Admissions Office, Function 2 Financial Aid, Function 3 Registrar’s Office, Function 4 the Bursar’s Office, etc. Each office has a specific function, e.g., the Registrar’s Office is responsible for registration and then passes (hands-off) registration data to the Bursar’s Office for tuition assessment and billing. These “hand-offs” are usually the points where problems arise.

From the student perspective, planning for a new semester usually begins with a review of their degree requirements with their advisor, selecting courses, checking financial aid, paying the tuition invoice, attending classes, and receiving grades. A student perceives this as a unified process, not a series of separate disconnected functions.

Process analysis, beginning with process mapping, is an important methodology for improving our ability to understand student needs and improve student services. We recommend that you stop treading water and initiate a project focusing on process analysis using process mapping methodology.

The team of focusEDU can assess and assist you with processing mapping methodology. Yes, it is possible to conduct process mapping in a manual manner, but there are software solutions to automate process mapping. A strategic approach is to build a process map using current processes. Look for gaps and redundancies on that map to determine what can be improved or changed to make the whole process more efficient and optimized — forget “this is the way we’ve always done this” — a fresh view is always strategic in process mapping. Build a new “what if” process map that incorporates needed workflow technologies and reduces the need for labor-intensive manual processes. Contact focusEDU — we can help!