Category: Shared Services

A move toward shared services can be an opportunity to rethink common practices. As Health Sciences Administration gears up to launch its new Shared Services Center in January 2018, staff have already been implementing new, more streamlined processes — and seeing improvements.

Rethinking before reorganizing

HSA supports ten health sciences units in administrative functions, and staff started considering how to improve and streamline many of those functions even before shifting to a comprehensive shared services model. In advance of Workday, HSA staff centralized payroll services across all ten units to help smooth the transition. They standardized a new best practices hiring model, which has brought in high-quality hires through a multi-tiered process, and has saved time and resources. Most recently, HSA developed a new approach to employee onboarding. Launched in spring 2017, it has made onboarding more consistent, and helps new staff feel welcomed and prepared for success.

A closer look: employee onboarding

HSA’s new onboarding process exemplifies how rethinking a common practice can lead to widely shared benefits. Previously, onboarding was inconsistent across HSA-supported units. New employees were invited, but not required, to attend a general orientation through UW central HR; only a few units had their own orientations. Directors couldn’t count on all new staff coming in with the same information, even within the same unit. And, since units are spread out across various buildings, new health sciences staff had few opportunities to meet people in other units, or each other. “Inconsistency is not the impression we want to leave on new employees,” says Kelly Johnson, HSA assistant director. “We want to make them feel they’re welcome in the university and in the HSA family.”

In 2016, HSA staff met with unit directors to reassess onboarding. Once they decided on a new approach, they did test runs with staff at various stages (new hires and older employees), to see how the new process could be further improved before rolling it out.

Now, all new staff in supported units attend the same HSA-run orientation: a two-hour session on their first day of employment, always on the second and fourth Mondays of each month. Having a general orientation takes administrative burden off of those units that did their own trainings, and ensures everyone is on the same page from day one. Orientation includes everything from where to eat, where to park or catch a bus, how to understand benefits and how to use Workday. New staff learn about trainings and seminars, and receive a checklist of exactly what they need to do and by when. HSA staff follow up with emails including links to various resources and a survey to provide feedback to help improve the program.

Perhaps most importantly, new employees are meeting and networking with colleagues across units before starting in their new positions — contributing to a greater sense of community across all of HSA’s supported staff.

A shared services center in the making

The changes to onboarding and other practices had HSA considering how to more holistically support their units’ mission-critical work and ease pressures on staff, especially as resources become increasingly limited. HSA leadership — comprising Johnson, Director Bob Ennes and Executive Director David Anderson — worked with unit directors to determine that a shared services center would be the best way forward.

First, unit directors and HSA staff created a long-list of possible services to include in a shared services center based on each units’ needs. Then HSA hired a project manager who helped create working teams and determine what will make most sense to include: high volume, routine transactions such as accounting, HR functions and IT support. Now, shared services subject matter experts (SMEs) are conducting on-the-ground research and coordination; in weekly meetings, the SMEs are mapping out the processes with HSA staff.

Transparency in the process creates momentum and buy-in

The process of creating a shared services center can and should look different for different contexts. But some parts of the process can be broadly applied, says Johnson. HSA has found that building buy-in is both challenging and crucial — and that it’s best accomplished by being as transparent as possible, every step of the way.

From the very beginning, HSA has encouraged staff from all units to participate in any planning and development meetings. They’ve also created a SharePoint site to which all employees have access. The site is a one-stop shop for unit staff, providing up-to-date details on the status of each task and the overall project, as well as a direct line of communication with HSA. It includes pages on the Center’s guiding principles, FAQ and space for questions, making the “how” and “why” of the process very clear.

This focus on transparency has really helped to address potential anxieties, says Johnson. “We’ve seen amazing engagement from employees,” she says, “because they’ve been invited to be part of the process.” She notes how important it is to be willing to talk to people whenever they have questions or concerns. One of the Center’s guiding principles, in fact, is to “ensure our communication is immediate, continuous, personal and transparent so that our customers know what to expect and when to expect it.”

On deck for the new Center

In July 2017, HSA completed the Plan and Assess stage of their development timeline. They are now beginning the Design stage, in which the subject matter expert teams research and recommend exactly which services to focus on, while units determine their particular needs. They’re also determining what staffing will look like: instead of a “lift-and-shift” model in which existing positions are reorganized, they plan to post new positions once roles are determined and encourage current unit staff to apply.

Learn more about the Shared Services Center: http://depts.washington.edu/uwhsa/shared-services/

View timeline as a PDF.

Four and a half years ago, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity, Student Life, Undergraduate Academic Affairs, the Graduate School — and, now, Enrollment Management — came together to develop a shared vision to transform the student experience with goals to advance and promote student access, diversity and engagement across the University. Then-Provost Ana Mari Cauce asked now-Provost Jerry Baldasty to serve as the first senior vice provost for Academic & Student Affairs, responsible for the coordination of this effort across the units.

These units operate independently; however, the UW’s capital campaign offered the opportunity to rethink advancement staffing and functions. Reorganizing as a shared service meant the units could increase fundraising and impact the student experience more than any one unit could alone without additional resources.

The challenge: To increase support for student success by better coordinating existing resources

Previously, advancement officers in each of the units worked independently with smaller portfolios of opportunity. It was not unusual for two officers to reach out to the same donor to fund similar programs. Donors interested in access, student success and diversity across the University were presented smaller proposals from single units, rather than larger, cross-functional and transformational proposals focused on a shared vision. Advancement resources were spread thinly across competing priorities and boutique programs.

The solution: A cross-functional team that supersizes service

The new shared-service model maintains the co-location of advancement officers
within the units while adding a matrixed reporting structure. This means that advancement officers have dual reporting lines: one to the unit leader, and the other to ASA Advancement. In this model, officers’ work intersects with the work of colleagues housed in other ASA units, and the cross-functional organization spurs collaboration and resource pooling. What is unique is that ASA Advancement goals, not just reporting lines, span the units — allowing officers to focus on both the particular funding opportunities based in each unit, as well as transformational ideas that cut across units.

Reorganizing the team revealed opportunities for scalable funding opportunities in areas such as leadership and careers, mentoring and advising, and access and diversity. In short, donors can now imagine their investments impacting student success throughout the University. The process of developing related fundable opportunities has brought together colleagues to collaborate in new ways that support the shared vision of unit leaders.

Benefits: “Growing the pie” with donor-centric coordination, consistency and professional growth

Working as an interconnected team has increased donor support. Before the shift to a shared model, fundraising of the five units totaled approximately $7 – 11 million per year. Now, it is currently close to $17 – 20 million annually in this campaign.

Developing a shared vision helped the unit leaders focus on transforming the UW student experience. The vice presidents and deans are prioritizing programs and initiatives that drive key student learning outcomes, impact the student experience at scale and spark the passion of investors.

This shared service model places the UW ahead of the curve regarding donor behavior. Trends in philanthropy indicate an increased focus on the student experience in a holistic way and on affinity — the specific groups, clubs and experiences donors were passionate about as students. Working together, ASA advancement officers can quickly respond to donors’ affinity and deepen their connection to the whole university.

The creation of a clear, shared vision allows officers from all units to speak passionately and effectively about UW priorities — which has benefited each unit’s communications efforts, as well. Communications directors now collaborate on strategies, messaging and content that support the student experience and the value of diversity.

Centralizing stewardship for each unit has also led to a more standardized, streamlined process for acknowledgements — and ASA Advancement has integrated these efforts into comprehensive donor engagement strategies for each unit. From the donor’s perspective, the ASA message is now timely, consistent and demonstrates the impact of their support through student stories.

In addition, the shared advancement team structure results in higher fundraiser performance. It also encourages mentoring, as more experienced fundraisers guide and advise newer ones. The broader base of expertise and interests naturally expands the skills of all team members, with a strong emphasis on meaningful metrics and collaboration.

Lessons learned:

• Donors aren’t the only audience, and change is hard. Shifting to this model meant helping staff and leaders understand that advancement is most successful when we focus efforts on a few vision-aligned priorities, and demonstrate the impact on students and their experiences — rather than addressing budget shortfalls or focusing on emerging projects that are beyond the scope of our current resources and strategy.
• A shared vision relies on buy-in. While the ASA Advancement model is structured with formal reporting lines, it depends on a broad network of collaborations that are more fluid. Developing a compelling vision and strong networks with staff members inspires those outside the reporting lines to work together. The informal networking to build trust is a continuous process. It requires constant refreshing both of the vision itself and the buy-in achieved through a sense of shared ownership and respect.
• Being nimble is a must to serve a rapidly evolving philanthropic environment. Reassess and innovate constantly to ensure the team’s organization, services and focus meet the complex needs of the units and the challenges facing higher education more broadly.

The challenge: Cultivating the next generation of major gift donors

In 2009, leading up to the “Be Boundless — For Washington, For the World” campaign, advancement leaders in the College of Engineering recognized a need to develop a new generation of major gift donors. At the time, the college’s advancement team consisted of major gift officers, but it needed broader coverage in “discovery” staff who could identify, and build relationships with newly rated and prospective donors.

The solution: Sharing discovery officers

Judy Mahoney, College of Engineering associate dean of Advancement, and Anne Fitzmaurice Adams, senior director of Individual Giving, came up with a way to fund those new positions by sharing services with the college’s academic departments. In this new model — spearheaded and managed by Mahoney and Adams — the college and four of its 10 departments share costs of discovery officer positions, as well as the operational expenses of fundraising efforts.

Benefits: Relationship-based service, increased giving and professional growth

Since the team’s inception, the discovery officers have been able to place 95 prospects into the college’s major gifts pipeline and remove 133 prospects from consideration. They have secured, to date, more than $5 million in additional support. Mahoney notes that benefits have extended well beyond the financial. Discovery officers are deeply invested in and understand the culture, needs and priorities of their assigned departments. They develop personal relationships, working closely with the department’s chair and meeting regularly with departmental faculty and staff, while also building relationships with prospective donors. The college has also been able to focus strategically on donor-centered talent management and the model has allowed for more cohesive, on-brand messaging across the college.

The new model couldn’t have come at a better time. There had been growing demand across the college for high-level professional advancement opportunities. The discovery officer positions fulfill that demand. By gaining on-the-job professional development and mentorship, they also create a stronger pipeline of well-trained staff for the entire department and the University.

Lessons learned: Start small, build buy-in and share data to help with decision-making

To roll out the model, the College of Engineering Advancement team started small, working with three departments to pilot: Mechanical Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering. They then began connecting with other departments — specifically those with high numbers of prospective donors. To foster buy-in across departments, Advancement collected fundraising and alumni data for each department and shared it with chairs. This way, chairs could better understand why the shared services model would be a good investment.

Next steps: Explore shared services in marketing and communications

Currently, Engineering’s Advancement team is expanding its shared services into areas of marketing and communications. The team has recently started collaborating with select departments, including Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering, to create shared positions in publications and website support.

Centralization can sometimes produce similar benefits to a shared services model — especially, when the priority is to reach more customers with improved service.

The challenge: Decentralized marketing and communications services led to inconsistency and confusion

Before 2008, marketing and communications were separate entities in the Foster School with independent reporting lines and goals. Most of Foster’s programs had their own web editors, as well as someone on staff serving in at least a partial marketing capacity.

As programs ran direct mail and advertising campaigns to recruit prospective students, there was a lot of room for confusion. Communications with prospective students sometimes overlapped, web standards were difficult to establish, and navigation across programs was uneven. This made it more difficult for prospects to look at multiple programs — and for the separate units to function efficiently.

Access to services was also uneven for the programs themselves. Revenue-generating programs could fund in-house marketing and communications needs, but others had fewer resources to do so — often, the same programs that could benefit most from a dedicated marketing team.

The solution: Build an internal marketing and communications “agency”

Staff in the marketing and communications units worked together to brainstorm how to best combine and improve services. With support from the dean, they decided to consolidate everything from the website to advertising, video production and market intelligence into one centrally supported Marketing & Communications unit.

To make the shift, the units merged under a single director who reports to the Associate Dean for Advancement. Advertising was paired with visual brand management to establish a consistent look and feel for outbound communications. Website management was transferred to an online marketing team to structure and support the community of web editors across Foster. They centralized web content creation, editing and theming services, and shifted responsibilities so that their multimedia producer could focus more on video production and tell more of Foster’s stories, from web features to marketing pitches, via video.

The team makes market intelligence more accessible, allowing programs to use information — such as demand for various degrees and the factors driving rankings — for future planning. In addition, they now do comprehensive advertising, recruitment campaigns, social media, communication plans and publication of Foster Business magazine. They create and execute marketing plans at the school, program and center levels that benefit all Foster’s programs.

The benefits: Service at greater scale with a smaller, nimble team

The team today is smaller, and yet they complete more, larger-scale projects. Since the new unit is centrally-supported, individual programs don’t need to build in marketing and communications capacities; all programs have access to the team’s improved services. “Centralization means we have a shared opportunity for the rest of the school — we can be shared further afield,” says Eric Nobis, managing director of Marketing and Communications at Foster.

For example, the Consulting and Business Development Center connects student consulting teams to local businesses. The program provides low-cost marketing services to minority- and women-owned businesses, and a real-world practicum for students. Foster’s centralized team now handles the program’s marketing and promotion at a scale that would have been previously unaffordable. These services bring in more support for the program — and by extension, the local community.

Foster’s work-compatible MBA programs also benefit from the team’s new approach. The four programs have revenue-generating need; they also often compete for students in the same market. Now, marketing and recruitment efforts can be more consistent, targeted and efficient, since they are all being executed by the same team.

Unlike conventional shared services models, the team’s coverage of services across Foster doesn’t lend itself to individual partnership-level agreements with clients, or to setting shared goals and values at the start of each service relationship. “The shared aspect to the new model is, primarily, the enabling of a broader set of clients than we otherwise could have,” says Nobis. And, as with shared services, the team is “really steeped in what they’re doing,” he says. Now, that expertise can reach programs, staff and students across Foster.

The challenge: Updating websites in units without web designers

What do you do when nearly every one of your websites is dated, unstable, off-brand or all of the above? In 2013, this was the situation for the College of the Environment’s many schools, departments and research units. From academic program homepages that didn’t mention the University of Washington to unstable, inaccessible websites that couldn’t be updated, the problems were varied and complex.

To add to the challenge, a number of the college’s units lost some or all of their web staff during the last economic downturn. Some units relied on a rotating group of graduate students to create and maintain their web presence; very few sites had an optimal number of visitors.

The solution: A centrally-supported website framework

After the marketing and communications team assessed the diverse communication needs of the college’s schools and departments and the resources available to help, they decided that updating the websites of units in the college was a major priority. An investment was made in 1.5 full-time staff members in the dean’s office. Without centralized investment, this change could have required each unit to hire a vendor or add a web professional to their staff.

“None of our websites were representative of the quality and unique character of our people or our work,” says Molly M. McCarthy, managing director of marketing and communications for the college. “We had an opportunity to make a huge impact in the way our units tell their own stories, share important research and recruit students.”

Joe Eastham, associate director of online communications, joined the team to develop the college’s unit website framework to meet these needs. The team chose WordPress to support the framework, which keeps the effort and cost of building, maintaining and hosting dozens of websites reasonable. Eastham can build carefully chosen features such as news sections and faculty profiles and then share them seamlessly with all websites in the framework.

Benefits: Independence, time-savings and improved services

“We wanted to respect the independence and expertise of each unit, while recognizing that some aspects of the process are more efficient when managed centrally,” says Eastham. “While each unit has a distinct voice, they all need human-friendly web design, development and support. Using a standard framework saves time and allows us to constantly improve our visitors’ experience and add new features, like searchable faculty directories and custom news categories.”

Next steps: Meet the growing demand

McCarthy, Eastham and team members Drew Collins, Cole Bessee and Jack Stoller have completed websites with 13 units, and are working on five more sites. After some initial hesitation, almost every major unit in the college has opted to participate, and smaller groups such as individual labs and faculty members have requested a future version of the program suited to their needs, as well. Initial fears about lack of control over content and design have calmed over time as more sites have launched, seamlessly blending the unit’s unique identity and the UW brand.

The marketing and communications team members continue to work toward bringing more UW environment sites into the framework, improving overall user experience and making the system easier for content editors. Someday, they hope to offer a limited version of the framework to a broader range of college projects and programs.

Lessons learned: Unit-led, with clear expectations and constant improvement

Several factors have been key to successful partnerships between the college team and individual units:

• Taking the time to understand the priorities and culture of each unit allows the team to build sites customized to their needs.
• Recognizing the subject matter expertise in each department or school, and giving them full control over web content is key.
• Being clear from the start about expectations and scope of work, such as the college’s focus on externally-facing content, keeps the size of each project manageable.
• Scheduling annual updates encourages a process of constant improvement and helps ensure that sites don’t fall into disrepair.

Examples of unit websites:
School of Environmental and Marine Affairs
Friday Harbor Laboratories
University of Washington Botanic Gardens
School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences
Earth Lab
Environmental Studies

The challenge: Departments doing more with lessThe challenge: Administrators’ time eaten up by transactional work

In 2011, the College of Arts & Sciences was seeking ways to address growing administrative workloads. Within departments, high-level administrators — hired for their special knowledge in, for example, Anthropology programs — were spending time on increasingly complex transactional tasks. For example, the move from paper to online travel expense reports made those processes more efficient overall, but relied on department administrators learning the new web systems, their complexities and any changes in processes. And when many individuals performed a task infrequently, compliance suffered. What should be standardized processes (such as filling out travel expense reports) became harder to manage and control for minor errors.

The solution: Move work out of departments to experts who do it best

The college launched its shared services center as a pilot, to see whether the model would relieve some of the pressure on administrators. And it has. The current team of five staff members serves approximately 1,500 employees across 24 college units, and executes transactions in 20 distinct areas such as travel and purchasing reimbursements, invoice payments, honoraria and awards, foreign national payments and visas, Human Resources and payroll. Administrators have more time for department priorities, and shared services team members are more efficient in the transactional work — because they do it all the time.

To get started, and to ensure the center would meet the needs of individual units, a group of department administrators first brought projections to the dean: which schools needed which transactional services, how much efficiency could be gained and how many new hires might be needed. Rather than consolidating existing administrators (a common way to form shared services centers), the college invested in new staff specifically for shared services: one manager and two fiscal specialists. As work volume increased over time, the team hired two more.

The benefits: Compliance and efficiency — plus freedom

Sharing services has sustained the creative energy and individuality of each department in Arts & Sciences. The team members provide technical expertise in university-level business practices while, at the same time, personally getting to know each unit’s culture and needs. But the team also helps to standardize practices when more efficient and assure compliance across the board.

Administrators are freed up to do more mission-focused, custom work, such as the administrative end of curriculum design, in direct support of professors in their teaching and research. The shift to shared services has also freed up funds for some departments.

As no funds were needed from department budgets to create the center, newly available funds can be re-allocated toward other staffing needs.

And, the whole college has benefitted from faster, more reliable services. The team has implemented an online ticketing system for intake of service requests — for example, a travel reimbursement request from a faculty member — that routes the request directly to the right person for the job. The system increases both efficiency in turn-around times and accountability. Customers can view the status of their requests in one online record. The system’s success has led the team to offer its web intake tools as templates for other communications across Arts & Sciences.

Lessons learned: Build trust and establish networks of mutual support

Active, consistent, on-the-ground support from both administrators and executive sponsors was crucial to the transition, says Heidi Tilghman, manager of the College of Arts & Sciences Shared Services (CASSS). “They made this growth possible,” she says, “as we created — primarily from scratch and involving multiple and ongoing iterations — our intake forms and step-by-step workflows, as well as our overarching goals, standards and tools for measuring success.”

Trust and communication have been vital to securing buy-in across units. Building trust takes time, notes Tilghman. To this end, she says, “careful staff recruitment is absolutely key — and we have been fortunate to attract eager, innovative and highly competent staff from the beginning, who not only learn new systems quickly, but who are deft communicators.” They’ve also made use of Lean methodology to help create a spirit of collaboration, inclusivity and shared responsibility with participating units.

A continuous cycle of feedback and improvement

As the team’s track record grew — of accurate, efficient and responsive work — so did demand for services. In spring 2016, the team re-evaluated: How could they manage increasing demand and maintain their service standards, without adding to staffing?

Working with an advisory group (seven volunteer administrators from member units), the team considered the widely varying needs and resources of participating departments. They recommended returning specific tasks to units and staff equipped to handle them. The shared services team decided to return reimbursement processing to the School of Art, Art History and Design (a large unit with its own well-supported processes) and return payroll processing to the English department (the unit with the largest number of employees).

These changes reduced turn-around times, and even allowed the team to add several small, understaffed units in the college to their service group. With some month-to-month variability, the team’s work volume is trending consistently upward — while maintaining a steadfast error rate of less than 2 percent.

The shared services center regularly asks for feedback from all participating units, to stay flexible in responding to changing needs and goals. In response to an informal survey, a staff member from the Dance program said that to have access to the center “feels like such a wonderful luxury.” A School of Music staff member put it more simply: “We are successful because of you.”

The challenge: Departments doing more with less

Between 2009 and 2011, the School of Medicine was facing new challenges in the areas of visas and grants administration. Budget reductions and changes to compliance rules prompted administrators to review their processes — and they noticed inefficiencies. At the time, each department managed its own visas for foreign visitors and grants administration, two complex areas requiring expertise that takes time to develop and maintain. In some departments, staff had to know a little bit about everything; for example, payroll specialists would spend time learning grants administration, a process they would only do infrequently. Other departments would invest time to develop one staff member’s expertise — and if that person left the position, the department was back to square one. In all cases, individual departments were doing more, with fewer resources, leading to staff turnover, inefficient processes and potential compliance risks.

The solution: A team of experts to partner with departments and faculty

In 2012, the dean’s office created a work group to consider implementing shared services, composed of department directors and administrators, dean’s office staff, campus partners with shared service experience and Lean methodology facilitators.

First, they outlined four primary goals: increased efficiency, compliance, customer service and overall value. Then, they defined criteria for departmental activities that would benefit from shared services, processes that are:

• common to all departments (excluding clinical and academic activities)
• transactional or common but infrequent
• reliant on specific expertise
• marked by clearly defined stopping and starting points
• key business processes
• drivers of customer satisfaction

Based on the criteria, two processes emerged as prime candidates for shared services: grants administration and visas for foreign visitors. Both are common but complicated processes, requiring extensive training and upkeep to stay on top of rules and guidelines. They are also high-stakes processes for applicants — making attention to customer service extremely important.

In July 2013, the School launched shared services in the form of a new Administrative Business Center (ABC), with grants and visas as the first two services to units. Staffed by a combination of redeployed departmental administrators and new hires, ABC offers resources to manage these processes more efficiently: namely, a team of dedicated experts providing one-on-one service. The model gives time back to administrators and allows the faculty recipients of grants and visas to focus on their research.

A collaborative, customer-driven approach

ABC functions through shared governance: a model in which customers (departments and individual grant and visa recipients) work in partnership with ABC staff to determine values, establish goals and carry out processes. The emphasis that ABC places on customer service means that staff are empowered to address issues as they arise, and customers feel listened to and valued.

The system relies on close one-on-one relationships between ABC and its customers: department chairs, faculty and PIs of research grants. It also relies on open lines of communication and regular feedback via customer surveys.

And the system works. According to surveys, customer satisfaction has been rising steadily — with 99 percent “satisfied” by the end of 2016, up from 79 percent the previous year.
“ABC has been terrific to work with,” says Cecilia Giachelli, professor of Bioengineering. “Their efficiency has allowed us to spend more time working on the grant science instead of worrying about the administrative pieces.” Says Wyeth Bair, associate professor of Biological Structure, “I would not have been able to submit [my] proposal on time without my grants administrator’s constant help. She seemed genuinely invested in the success of the proposal, which conferred a team mentality to the process.”

A team mentality applies to ABC’s administrative partnerships as well, including their Faculty Oversight Committee (FOC), the Administrative Business Leadership Enterprise (ABLE) committee and School of Medicine leadership. “All are essential for our functioning, and for high-level strategic guidance and perspective,” says SoM Director of Business and Operations Marie Carter-DuBois.

Lessons learned

Prosise notes several lessons that ABC has learned along the way, that apply to shared services centers in other units and contexts:

• Define the mission and vision: Understand and articulate why shared services will have value for customers
• Communicate and build trust with customers — those who use or benefit from the service — from the very beginning, and incorporate the “customer voice” into goals and values
• Build a robust governance structure — make sure you have support
• Invest heavily in staff hiring and training upfront, and involve unit staff in planning processes as soon as possible
• Invest in the right tools and have them ready (ABC uses SharePoint)
• Determine metrics for measuring success (and collect baseline data, if possible)
• Stay flexible: Ask for feedback and be prepared to change processes, policies or procedures as necessary

Next steps

ABC is currently in the process of launching new services in human resources and payroll, working closely with a newly formed HR/Payroll committee. To coincide with the launch of Workday and ease the transition for departments, they began offering payroll services in June 2017. As for next steps, says Prosise, ABC is committed to continuous process improvements and making sure new services are responsive to departments’ needs.

View graphic as a PDF

In many areas of the UW, if you don’t know how to get something done — post a graduate student assistant position, buy a new laptop, reimburse an expense or track the status of grant funding, for example — it can take time to figure it out. Unit administrators often wear many hats and process countless types of transactions. Many wish they could do less paperwork and devote more time to efforts that more directly benefit the faculty and students of their department, school or college.

Sharing staff across units to improve service for everyone

Shifting to a shared service model is a way for participating groups to simplify processes for the faculty, staff and students who use common services. Groups can share resources and funding across units, departments, schools or colleges by forming a team to improve service to all participating units. Units usually opt in to a shared service model and choose from a menu of services. The shared service center staff are accountable to the participating units to perform work based on agreed upon measures such as turn-around time and quality. Ideally, the result is quicker, better, more reliable service.

Economies of scale, even for small units

By sharing, smaller units can benefit from economies of scale without losing local control and accountability to their unique needs. The primary goal of shifting to this model is to improve service, not to cut costs, although efficiencies sometimes generate savings or opportunities to redeploy funds.

A single “front door”

In a shared service model, there is one starting place for a wide range of work. An email, phone call or log in prompts shared service center staff to direct requests to the person who can best respond. By having one “front door,” staff can also triage requests, ensuring that a grant with a looming deadline, for example, is attended to before a less urgent request like finding a research-sponsor contact.

Best suited to transactional work, but not exclusively

Highly transactional work, especially that which occurs less frequently in the individual units, is well suited to shared services. Work that is compliance-focused, infrequent but specialized, or supported by systems is also a good fit. Many shared service centers tackle routine business functions such as travel planning and voucher reimbursement, purchasing and payroll. Standard communications efforts such as web design or marketing can also work well when shared. Even advancement functions can be shared if units have common or overlapping goals and donor bases.

Often frees up local administrators to focus on mission-specific work

Moving to a shared service model can allow units to create a tiered model of service. Participating units can send transactional work to the shared service center to be done more quickly at higher volume. This frees up the unit administrators to specialize or do more mission-specific, complex work such as advising or curriculum support.

More accountability than with purely centralized services

Participating units usually sign agreements to form shared service centers. These “service-level agreements” include details about what exactly the shared service group will do for the unit and clarify expectations around performance. In contrast, centralized units set agendas centrally and are less accountable to groups who use their service.

Rethinking the work, not just moving it

A shift to shared services usually entails rethinking both the work itself and how the team handles work coming in. It also may involve training all members of the team on a range of tasks so that any employee in the shared-service unit can work on any transaction. Once established, teams focus on continuously improving their services based on staff input and customer feedback.

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Additional Resources

Groups at the UW are employing a range of shared service models. Some examples include:

For communications/information
College of the Environment
Foster School of Business

For business functions
College of Arts & Sciences Shared Services
School of Medicine’s Administrative Business Center (ABC)
UW HR, payroll and benefits Integrated Service Center
Enrollment Information Services

For advancement
Academic & Student Affairs
College of Engineering

If your group is interested in exploring shared services, contact a colleague from one of these UW units, learn more about other universities using shared services, or email tapteam@uw.edu.

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