Friday Focus: The PIT Crew and other new projects
May 23, 2019
— by Julie Queen, interim vice chancellor for administrative services
In the past two weeks, I have had the pleasure of helping kick off one new campuswide process improvement project and wrap up another. Continuous improvement is intended to be regular and ongoing, so these events in combination allow me to see this life cycle in action.
The UAF Process Improvement and Training Crew, created in 2012, is part of the Office of Management and Budget under Director Briana Walters. She has recently hired a lead PIT Crew facilitator and project manager, Amber Leytem. Amber brings a wealth of experience in this area. The PIT Crew has inducted four new members, expanding its existing capacity to help UAF stakeholders. I extend a warm welcome to Kelly Gitter (OIT), Amy Bristor (Office of Admissions), Brianna Pauling (CRCD RAHI) and Jessica Armstrong (eCampus) – we look forward to your contributions as part of the crew!
The PIT Crew is a team of process mapping and implementation planning facilitators, focused on managing people through change. This team is made up of employees from various areas of campus, with regular day jobs, who share different perspectives from research, academics, administration, student services, technology, etc. Using a framework developed by Professional Growth Systems, UAF has adapted these tools to step through projects of all sizes, allowing stakeholders to achieve significant and measurable results over time. The PIT Crew doesn’t own the solutions but enables teams of functional business owners or customers to come together to document a process, recommend and implement change, or streamline. I am proud to have played a key role in creating and nurturing this group of motivated leaders.
The project we recently concluded was focused on leveraging financial aid. This need was identified as part of the strategic enrollment planning efforts and took eight months for a team to recommend and implement meaningful improvements to the student financial aid notification and award process. This is expected to have a direct and positive impact on student recruitment. Thank you to Vice Chancellor Keith Champagne for serving as the executive sponsor for this important effort and to the members of the Scholarship Transformation and Revitalization team for their dedication in addition to their regular responsibilities.
The new project was also identified during the SEP process and is focused on the approval process for academic courses and programs. Sponsored by Provost Anupma Prakash, Associate Vice Provost Alex Fitts and me, this is the first project to connect a faculty-driven procedure with administration in an effort to create efficiencies. I look forward to what this team will produce.
Other projects on deck include graduating more graduate students, improving tuition assistance for military and veteran students, and automating journal voucher workflows. There are more ideas coming out of the chancellor’s task force on improving policies and procedures that will also be considered. These types of efforts serve as bright spots at UAF, bringing teams together to achieve results.
For more information about the PIT Crew, or to request facilitation, please visit: https://uaf.edu/finserv/omb/process-improvement/pit-crew/.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week.