In November 2022, we mentioned receiving funding and endorsement from President’s Executive Management Team to deliver operational improvement roadmaps for UBC HR, IT and Finance in partnership with Nous Group (Nous) and Cubane Consulting (Cubane), as part of an effort to drive UBC’s vision of service transformation forward.
The purpose of this project is to identify, prioritize and pursue improvement opportunities across UBC IT, Finance and HR.
This Service Transformation project relies on data from UniForum and Workday to understand where improvement opportunities exist and how they should be prioritized, as well as a variety of stakeholder engagements to test insights, understand the current state and plan for improvement opportunities. The final output will be a customized improvement roadmap for each function, which includes both existing improvement work and new transformation initiatives identified through this project.
Here are the initiatives identified to have the greatest impact in the short-term:
HR
- Implement standardized recruitment processes, structures and roles across central and faculties.
IT
- Standardize application support services and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and communicate across users to generate awareness and set clear service expectations.
- Develop an IT applications rationalization program, identifying key opportunities to consolidate applications that duplicate capability across UBC including new Workday capability.
- Review and refine IT support services funding models across the IT services catalogue to align incentives with efficiency drivers.
Finance
- Implement a finance training and education program, which clarifies new roles required to successfully operate revised processes, and trains staff in key specialist positions outside of central finance teams.
- Establish an integrated procure-to-pay service, which streamlines key handovers across AP, AR, and procurement, and implements critical system integrations to remove manual handling.
- Finance and HR to collaborate to understand shared data needs, and investigate ways to improve data quality for budgeting and forecasting.
Once the roadmaps are finalized, each function will make a decision on when to implement the initiatives.