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Vol 8, No 1 • Quality Improvement in Financial Management at the University of Washington • Spring 2009 |
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SCENE: The Ave in the Sixties – a small group of hippies are having a business meeting on the corner of Brooklyn and 47t h: Hippie #1: “Aw, man! I can’t keep answering all these questions from tourists. It’s putting my tie-dye production behind schedule! Always the same questions, day in and day out.” Hippie #2: “Hey man, I hear ya! It’s the same problem with my turquoise rings. Can’t find time to hitchhike down to Arizona for new supplies.” Hippie #3: “Wait, I got it! Let’s get our heads together, produce a list of common questions and print up a flyer with the questions and the answers. Then we can staple them to poles around the area.” Hippie #2: “Well, that’s a groovy idea, but what will we call the list?” Hippie #3: “I got it, Bro! How about Funky Answers to Questions -- FAQs!” Hippie #1: “Cool, far out man! Can I print them on tie-dyed tee shirts?” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SCENE: Grant and Contract Accounting – 2009 Employee #1: “We need to figure out how to streamline communication so GCA and campus can process accounts more quickly – Could we develop a system so our customers can find the answer to frequently asked questions in a common location?” Employee #2: “Let’s get everyone together, create a list of common questions and answers, and ask our webmaster to post it to the web.” Employee #3: “Great idea! Our webmaster said when he was here in the 60’s, he saw some kind of paper lists posted on the telephone poles. He can’t remember the exact title, but it was something like FAQ -- maybe Frequently Asked Questions? Seriously, folks, the questions GCA gets aren’t funky and we want to provide useful answers. When GCA realized that phone calls and emails from our customers feature a core set of questions—the same questions asked over and over again—we decided to start a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) web page. Created with GCA customers in mind, this FAQ page has unique features. The left side menu references categories like “budget set up” and “invoices”; each category contains a group of questions and answers. Our FAQ website currently contains nineteen categories, some which are currently empty. Each category takes you to a separate web page, where the questions are listed. Click on the question (in a shaded box); a white space with the answer will open up between the boxed questions. Campus feedback to the new FAQ site has been very positive. We’re adding questions each week, so send your questions and update suggestions to gcaques@u.washington.edu. “Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin on.” Funny how things you deal with every day have a habit of fading into the background. You can be sitting there, staring at all the pretty, swirling colors of your daily routine and BLAZOW! Right out of the ether it seems to swim out at you: a new way of doing things. Of course, the reality never quite matches up with that, more like some bloated whale coming up for a breath of air than something swimming through the…where was I? Oh – new ways of doing things. Right. So journal vouchers fit right in there – something Payroll’d see every day. Just get your numbers, fill out the journal voucher to move the money from one place to another, send it off to the bosses for signatures. Then you’d wait, man. Just wait. Maybe not long, but you’d wait. Then you’d get them back and you’d head to the copy machine for a little copying action. Watching that light go back and forth and somehow spitting out these perfect little copies of the original…how does it do that, man? I mean…it’s just spooky. …What? Oh, the process – right. Well, then you have this stack of copies, see? And once you had those you had to grab the highlighter and make sure the copies were marked right so they’d all go to the right people. Then you’d take it on over to Payables to enter. If you did it right, one would even come back to you. If you counted or marked wrong, man, a few might come back to you, then you’d have to find out who was missing their copy. And nearly every time, this copy would just go to a file somewhere and sit there, waiting for the day it could go to the great shredder. Just think of the trees, man. All those trees. So there I was, staring at the pretty light of the copier, just whirring its magical way into spitting out another copy of my journal voucher, when it hit me: why go through all this? Seriously? I fill out my spreadsheet and print it out so someone else could enter it into their spreadsheet to enter it into a system? Why, man? Why? What if I just entered it on their version of the spreadsheet and skipped all the steps in between? Wouldn’t that free up more time for work or, better, staring at the pretty light of the copier? So Payroll began to work on doing just that, and I tested it for nearly six months, changing things up here and there to make it all run smoothly. But then a new lightning bolt hit! Why send a spreadsheet over to Payables so they could, in turn, toss it into a system we already had? Why do that? Just a drag, man, that’s what it was. Why not just do that part ourselves, too? Why? Well that’s what I’m saying, man! So we took the new process there, too, getting our own JV numbers and everything, going through more hoops than a beach party, dig? But on March second, we jumped through the last one and sent off our own journal vouchers for the first time. Man, just information typed into a spreadsheet and then sent directly to the system – not a signature or piece of paper in sight, dig? And the best part? We saved hours of time not printing out the journal vouchers, making copies of them, and then walking them all over far and gone. And we saved Payables time and effort, too, doing it ourselves, freeing them up to do more important things. Save the trees and time? Far out, man, just….far out. Procurement Services, which includes Purchasing Services, Financial Services, and eCommerce, now has its own single point of contact for customer inquiries. As part of an ongoing organizational process improvement effort, a new unit called Procurement Customer Service (PCS) has been created to answer and address many types of procurement-related questions. Leaders of Procurement Services recognized that, as a newly formed organization within FM, it was important to create a seamless experience for its customers, an experience that would both anticipate and meet customer needs. To effectively serve the campus, the PCS group was created. The PCS group is a one-stop shop for getting information about procurement-related issues either by email or phone. In most cases, customers won’t need to determine whether to call Purchasing, eCommerce, or Accounts Payable. Customers won’t experience telephone or email "ping pong ball.” PCS is a critical asset within Procurement Services. PCS is customer facing and the professionalism, ability to communicate and overall positive group attitude will be key components that drive the success of the new unit. In addition to answering general inquiries, PCS will facilitate and communicate efficient procurement strategies and practices to campus customers and suppliers by analyzing complicated procurement questions and problems, providing procurement training to staff and customers, and treating everyone with courtesy and respect. Eventually, this group will develop a knowledge base for more complex procurement questions. The new PCS staff members each bring experience from the following units: Peace. Let me clue you in - change is constant, at least in the world of Financial Management (FM). We’re always striving to improve our processes and with the financial climate going down the tubes (what a bummer), those efforts are vital to our continued success. How can we do more with less? How can we make our work climate groovy even in these stressful times? What goals can we set for ourselves and the department? Everyone in the department needed to chill out and be part of this discussion; so, on February 4,2009, Student Fiscal Services (SFS) closed their offices in Schmitz Hall and decided to hang out at the South Campus Center for a real happening. We started the day with a review of SFS and reminded ourselves that we do more than disburse financial aid and take tuition payments from students — we handle the bread, the loot, for the entire campus. Our leaders have been working on hip action plans developed from the “Extraordinary Leader” survey and we heard about their efforts. We reminded ourselves of the FM Strategy map, our SFS Dashboard and our key initiatives. We talked, we listened, we brainstormed and we looked ahead. The enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas was impressive. Our karma was good. By the end of the day we decided to get it on and charter three groovy new teams to help us move forward. Team 1 will be working on “Stretch Goals: How to set them and how to follow through.” Nifty brainstorming ranged from the desire for more training to better communication to going paperless to expanding telecommuting opportunities. Far out! Team 2 will be working on “Relationship Building.” Cool ideas generated here fell into three relationship / network building categories including: professional, personal, and general. Team 3 will be working on “Diversity.” Financial Management has the spiffy Diversity Team and SFS participates in their activities. Student Fiscal Services wants to take the next step and look at what we can do to practice inclusion and value diversity. Efforts could include sharing at all-staff meetings, having our own multi-cultural celebrations and training in the department. Out of sight! While not quite a love-in, we all had a blast. Is this the start of a new age, if not of Aquarius, at least of teamwork in SFS?
Drupal is a real happenin’ open source Content Management System written in PHP and used for building and maintaining websites. Since it is open source, it has many contributing developers and is ever-evolving and mind expanding. It is highly customizable as there are any number of modules available to add to your installation to expand functionality, and more are added to the list each day. Know what else? It’s FREE…now that’s groovy…even more so these days. SFS was one of the early entries into the Drupal conversion arena. But how to go about it? I’ll share a little something I’ve learned…it’s all in the navigation. Of course good, solid content is a plus, but first your users need to find it…easily. After meeting with the leaders in SFS to discuss possible navigation options for the new site, we decided to focus on our 3 major customer groups: students, parents and UW departments. With the Drupal modules and menu system it was easy to create a separate menu for each group. Once a menu is created, it may be shown on, or excluded from, any pages that you assign allowing much more flexibility and control. If there is a change to a menu, you update it in one place and that menu is updated on all of the pages to which it is assigned. No more keeping track of what menu links are on what web pages…this is far out! Want to move a menu item to the top of the list? Just drag and drop it in the menu interface, click save and the item is relocated! Can you dig it? Oh the many hours spent with UNIX and the Pico editor…what a drag man. Writing pages, making changes, and trying to remember the string of commands and list of folders needed to push the pages into production…ah, the good ol’ days. Then there was Dreamweaver. It certainly made editing pages groovier, but still the need to logon to the terminal and push the pages into production. Say goodbye to all of that rigmarole. With Drupal, you simply check a box to select published, click save and the page is live! If you want to publish or unpublish several pages at one time, you may select them on the content screen and then assign a command to them all. This same content screen shows you the status of all pages and allows you to sort them by status, content type or category. Once the content was moved over, formatting the new pages was a snap. Peace out HTML, hello markdown! Markdown uses some simple text markers to generate valid, well-formed XHTML. Don’t know much about HTML or markdown? There is a fab Drupal module for the addition of a text editor. This is a handy tool for those doing quick postings or updates. Also, user roles may be set up for specific tasks. This is a groovy way to allow subject matter experts to keep on top of any changes in their web content and not have to wait for the updates to be done elsewhere. That’s so boss! Reading through your pages and find a typo? No need to track down the file in the development folder, open it for editing in Dreamweaver or some other program then back to push it into production…just login on that very page, make the change and save it. Update done, far out. Drupal is a great tool and fairly intuitive and a much-welcomed addition for managing the website. There are many more things that you can do in Drupal with a little time, patience and some newly-honed programming skills. Check out the new SFS pages to see what we’ve done with a little help from Drupal. Peace out. Hey, man. You know how – like – when you’re spinning around on the grass at a Jefferson Airplane show in Golden Gate Park? And how, when you’re just turning and turning and then look up at the sky it seems like everything just falls into place and all of the universal vibrations find you and hit you with some far-out insight? Well, the recent Extraordinary Leader 360° Assessment that the Treasury Leaders did is a lot like that. For the leaders from Real Estate Office, Risk Management, Investment Accounting and Administration, and Asset Liability Management, this journey of self-discovery began with a retreat in September 2008 hosted by Cheryl Hawley that introduced the basic concepts of Extraordinary Leadership; “Good does not equal great,” “Profound Strengths and Fatal Flaws,” and the idea of feedback as a gift. Among the key takeaways from this retreat was the idea of a “Leadership Tent,” made up of five competencies or “tent poles”: 1) A focus on results Each one of these competencies is important to extraordinary leadership, with the key competency being “Character,” where the leader displays high integrity and honesty. Some of the behaviors listed under the other competencies will be familiar to members of Financial Management: Champions change, Establishes stretch goals, and Customer focus. Research in this area has shown that strong scores in just one of the competencies can increase the scores of other areas. This reinforces the notion of focusing on core strengths which is central to the concept of Extraordinary Leader. Each leader chose who would receive their questionnaires, but they were distributed broadly. Peers, direct reports, managers, customers, and process partners all had an opportunity to provide feedback. The idea was to get the perspectives of people from all over the organization, above, below, and on the same level. Hence the name “360°” feedback. After the initial retreat, the team met again in January of 2009 to focus on the results of the 360° assessment. Cheryl led the team through the process of understanding the data. After Cheryl’s general follow-up, each of the leaders met individually with a trained expert to review and interpret their own feedback. This was a very valuable exercise for the Treasury Leaders and provided not only honest feedback, but a roadmap for future improvements. Steve Kennard from the Real Estate Office particularly liked the customer focus of the questionnaire and found that the “negative” feedback was the most helpful. Judy Peterson, from Investment Accounting and Administration, valued the direct feedback from her supervisor and was relieved to find that she is not perceived as having any “fatal flaws.” In general, the 360° assessment gave a totally positive vibe to the “squares” – with hippie tendencies – on the Treasury Leaders Group. For several years, the Travel Office has been working towards automating travel reimbursements. Ariba was the software package purchased to develop eProcurement, which expanded the University’s purchasing options. A module came with the software package for travel and expense reimbursements. A team was formed to review the module which consisted of several campus departments and the Travel Office. Once it was determined that the module would benefit campus, a proposal was submitted to the Information Management Advisory Committee (I-MAC) for approval. This committee oversees university-wide technology projects; prioritizing projects for development and funding. It was approved by the committee but not funded. The Travel Office and the Office of Information Management was determined to develop the module and used existing resources to move forward in implementing the project with little to no funding. User Project Approach The system was developed through input from a user group. The team was comprised of individuals from several campus departments, including Applied Physics Lab, School of Medicine, Ocean and Fishery, Law School, Institute of Nuclear Theory and Financial Management (see team members below). The project manager was Erick Winger. For a year the team evaluated the system to make sure it would meet the needs for campus departments and the Travel Office. We completed over 20 feedback sessions across campus to find out what departments would like to see in an automated travel system. The team came to the conclusion that we should move forward with the project. A monumental occasion for us all! We proceeded to implement the system based on the feedback we received. The system has generated huge efficiencies and faster reimbursements. Travelers will get reimbursed sooner; in most cases, overnight. The automated processing of travel expense reimbursements will save time for departments, Financial Services and the Travel Office. The estimated annual time savings is 20,800 hours, or $800,000 based on 25,000 travel expenses vouchers (TEVs) processed. Implementation of eTravel: • Eliminates manual routing; automatically calculates per diem and mileage rates, and coordinates data entry and review. • Eliminates a need to enter and approve a PAS purchase order and manual routing of reimbursement forms for approval. • Provides an improved user interface, coordinated entry and review, and automatic calculation of per diem and mileage rates. Process Improvement: In anticipation of eTravel, the Travel Office made some changes that greatly streamlined our processes: • We teamed up with Accounts Payable and Purchasing to route vendor invoices to the appropriate office for processing and Accounts Payable for payment. Doing so eliminated several steps from the old process. • Living Allowances previously processed on invoice vouchers can now be processed through eTravel. Far out man!! Implementation We went live with eTravel on Feb 2nd, 2009. eTravel is being implemented using a controlled roll-out beginning with our pilot group, beta testers and the departments of our team members. Next our plan is to implement eTravel to large colleges, such as Arts and Sciences and Engineering. We already have several other departments that are interested in becoming early adopters. We will continue to sign departments up until the campus is saturated. Our goal is to have eTravel rolled out by the end of the year and thus eliminating paper Travel Expense Vouchers. Thanks to Sponsors/Process Partners We would like to thank our sponsors, Cindy Gregovich and Ann Anderson, for being such huge supporters along with our process partner, the Office of Information Management. We would also like to thank Purchasing and Financial Services, who were so willing to work with us throughout our invoice process improvement. Early word on the streets is that eTravel is a huge success. eTravel Team Members: Erick Winger, Project Manager - Financial Accounting |