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Project Rationale and Overview
The Current Environment and Situation at Lane
- Growing student enrollment over the last several years with no proportional growth in staff.
- Increased reliance on state funding. The new state funding formula for community colleges rewards and dictates further enrollment growth.
- Increasing demands from students and other customers for more and better services
- Increasing work load on staff due to enrollment growth, increasing customer demands and more government regulation.
- Increasing competition for students from traditional higher education and commercial providers, especially over Internet.
- College reliance on information technology especially to automate current processes and manual procedures.
Future Challenges Facing Lane
- More financial pressures
- More pressures for accountability from the public and government.
- Continued pressure to increase and maximize enrollments.
- Quantum increase in competition for students, especially through distance learning technologies.
- Increasing local population base.
- Increasing competition for educated and skilled employees in the local labor market.
Goals of Process Redesign at Lane
- To improve and enhance the teaching/learning environment.
- To improve the quality, effectiveness and scope of services to students and other customers of the college.
- To improve the efficiency of college processes.
- To relieve the workload stress on employees.
Meeting the Challenges
Lane has made a considered effort over the last few years to meet the challenges of our situation and to anticipate the challenges of the future.
- Budget reductions have been strategic and not opportunistic. The college has not issued hiring freezes, spending freezes or across-the board cuts to meet expected deficits.
- The budget strategy has included dedicating unexpected non-recurring funds to one-time investments. Investments in staff and in technology have been a top priority (e.g., instructional technology initiatives, the college network, staff and organizational development).
- The college have developed alternative revenue sources including grants, contracted training, and short-term training programs.
- The college initiated and passed a construction bond issue.
- Many departments have conducted quality improvement projects.
BUT these efforts have not been enough.
Process redesign CAN help Lane to make the changes necessary to meet our challenges. Process redesign results in radical change of core college processes. simply stated, a team of staff members are provided with training, analytical tools and facilitation support that enable them to learn about customer needs and to evaluate and improve work methods. The process redesign team then redesigns the process to accomplish the desired outcomes in that delivers better service more effectively and more efficiently. A hallmark of process redesign is the use of technology in creative ways to make possible great gains in service and efficiency.
What process redesign is NOT
- Process redesign is NOT downsizing.
- Process redesign is NOT another name for budget reductions or 'RIF.'
- Process redesign is NOT a top-down process.
The process redesign philosophy supports college values. The values are:
- Empower college staff who actually so the work to own the work.
- Concentrate on the student/customer first and improve services to students.
- Encourage innovation, creativity and risk-taking.
- Encourage meaningful, fulfilling work and discourage non-value-added activities.
- Rely on teamwork.
- Work across departmental/functional boundaries.
- Discourage hierarchy and authoritarian management.
Process Redesign is change. Who needs to change to make process redesign work? Everyone!
- Employees involved in redesign projects need to look at their work in different ways and need to work with others in different ways.
- Managers need to become coaches, facilitators, and consultants.
- The president and vice presidents need to become visionaries and enablers. They need to encourage process redesign teams to think radically and them they need to support design team solutions.
'Process Redesign will become a way of life at Lane.'
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