Creating efficient campus connections

There is a lot of change that takes place at the university as its processes and policies evolve to meet the needs of students, staff and faculty. Janette Boden, manager of process effectiveness, and her team in ConnectionPoint work with staff and faculty across campus to ensure that the changes they’re seeing are good ones.

Having been on campus for more than 12 years, Boden has a wide range of experiences, first as a financial analyst in the College of Agriculture and Bio-Resources, then as an MBA student, and a management and marketing instructor with Edwards School of Business.  “Coming to ConnectionPoint with these different perspectives has been invaluable,” said Boden. “The experiences of a student, faculty and staff member really are unique, and their administrative needs are so different.”

It’s because of this that ConnectionPoint’s services aren’t built one size fits all. “It’s important to maintain some flexibility,” said Boden, “even when we’re working to make things as efficient as possible it’s essential for us to be able to understand everyone’s unique perspectives.”

Acting as internal consultants, Boden and her team work to identify the root cause of an issue. “We help to organize and facilitate conversations across campus,” said Boden. “We look at things from the customer perspective and then we run through a scenario with staff or faculty who utilize the service. If you look at travel claims as an example, we’ve come a long way from the paper copies that had to move from office to office just a few years ago.”

While a lot of their work is centered around ConnectionPoint processes, the process effectiveness team collaborates across campus working with groups like Facilities, Procurement and People and Resources.

“We’re able to work with groups and draw out information so they don’t have to shift gears from their day-to-day,” said Boden.

By bringing an outside perspective, Boden and her team examine pain points, taking a process apart, looking at the different pieces and understanding what is or isn’t working. “It’s not uncommon for experts to be in the weeds,” said Boden. “We’re able to look at processes from a different perspective and then help teams get a sense of what they’d like the future state to look like.”

Managing process effectiveness isn’t just about creating efficiency, it’s about creating freedom to focus on work you’re passionate about.  “We know that change can be intimidating,” said Boden. “The most important thing for everyone to know is that making changes isn’t about doing things faster or better so that you can do more work, it’s about freeing up time in your day to focus on the areas that are really important to the University and your role as well as the work you really enjoy. This applies to everyone from a researcher to one of our ConnectionPoint agents.”