From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, April 21, 1997

Glossary, précis help sort out
Alpha-Bits

By Justin Harmon

An executive assistant of my acquaintance occasionally despairs of keeping track of the boss's administrative task force commitments, in part because she can't keep the groups straight. Given the possibility that there may be others on campus bewildered by the sudden proliferation of groups with names that appear to have poured from a box of Alpha-Bits, I have assembled both a glossary of terms and a précis of the administrative reform efforts they represent.

Glossary of Definitions (GD)

Administrative Planning Group (AdPG): not a task force, this is a subset of the President's Cabinet, executive officers who assemble every two weeks with the leaders of the various task forces to review and promote progress on their initiatives.

Administrative Process Team (APT): a task force intended to encourage the streamlining of administrative processes, particularly those that cross organizational boundaries, using team-based problem-solving methods.

Management Development Advisory Group (MDAG): successor to the Management Development Task Force (MDTF), charged with developing plans to implement a comprehensive program of staff training and development, as well as to foster a workplace culture conducive to good management.

Planning and Data Access Group (PDAG): a group that considered the future of administrative computing at Princeton, generating the Partnership 2000 plan (sometimes referred to as P2K) for a University-wide move to distributed computing.

Princeton Desktop Initiative (PDI): sometimes referred to as the "PC on every desktop initiative," which aims to establish standard hardware and software for administrative computing purposes.

Précis of Administrative Reform Efforts (PARE)

So, what's the bottom line? Why should Princeton, with its $4.8 billion endowment, worry about admini-strative efficiencies?

One answer was given by President Shapiro at Princeton's first-ever management conference last June. While all of higher education faces significant economic pressures in

the years ahead, Shapiro told 126 assembled managers, "Princeton's survival is not at stake. But survival is not our objective. We are trying to be the best we can be and to fully exploit every opportunity to enhance our distinction." Achieving that objective requires "innovation in everything that we do," he said. "We need continuing innovation in our classrooms; we need continuing innovation in our offices."

Another answer to the question was given by staff members during focus groups sponsored by MDTF two years ago. Employees said that they frequently see ways to save time and energy and to improve effectiveness in the workplace, but they believe they lack the authority or the cooperation necessary to implement them.

Speaking at the management con-ference with Shapiro, James Henderson, CEO of Cummins Engine and a former Princeton trustee, offered insights derived from a Cummins effort to increase productivity.

"What motivates people," Hender-son said, "is the content of their jobs; recognition; satisfaction; feelings of competence; opportunities for growth; and an open, honest and trusting environment. People need to control their own resources and their work, to feel accountable and responsible for their work, and to have a sense of working for the customer--not the supervisor.

"In this environment, the role of the leader is to help connect the worker with the customer, to raise sites, to get buy-in to goals, to see that the group assigns responsibility for tasks, to pro-vide training as necessary, to deal with conflicts and to celebrate successes."

The challenge of creating such a workplace describes the impetus for the Princeton task forces, whose various charges frame complementary objectives.

APT

The statement of purpose adopted by the members of APT says, in part: "We believe that flexible, innovative thinking about structures and pro-cedures can make our administrative tasks simpler; that employees at all levels and in all areas of the University can and should make substantial contributions to process improvement; and that streamlining administrative processes can enhance not only efficiency but also job satisfaction."

APT, led by Associate Treasurer Chris McCrudden and Molecular Biology Department Manager Alice Lustig, identifies operational challenges that might benefit from team problem-solving, through suggestions offered from all over campus. Criteria for projects include the extent to which they cross admini-strative boundaries and are problems for which clear channels do not already exist; the potential that anti-cipated solutions may be implemented and have lasting effect; and the likelihood of their cost-effectiveness.

Having identified a potential project, APT assembles the admini-strators who oversee various aspects of the process in question and seeks their advice on assembling a representative team to work on the project. Once the team is constituted, APT provides a trained facilitator and assigns a liaison to keep track of the progress of its work.

Projects undertaken to date include

Teams are currently seeking ways to expedite campus mail delivery, to use new communication technologies to reduce the flow of paper, to make it easier to sign up for computer accounts, and to facilitate the imple-mentation of a new computing system for administering sponsored research grants.

In addition, APT seeks to support innovative management by serving as a sounding board for individuals and groups and by consulting with managers who wish to use team-based problem-solving methods to address challenges within their own units.

"We find that as more and more people get involved and speak to their colleagues, we're getting requests to participate," Lustig says. "We hope that, over time, this flexibility, the collabor-ative spirit that informs team-based problem-solving, will represent the norm in the Princeton workplace."

"In the past there really wasn't a forum for these kinds of discussions," said McCrudden. "One of the delights of the perspective we're getting is the depth of the Princeton work force. We have wonderful, tremendously capable people working here."

MDAG

Almost three years ago, MDAG's precursor MDTF was charged by the provost to examine University management practices and to identify changes that would help to achieve higher morale and job satisfaction among workers, as well as improving productivity and quality of work; to articulate a standard of good manage-ment practice; and to make recommendations for a management-development program that would improve the effectiveness of super-visors at all levels.

MDTF's report recommended that Princeton adopt a set of principles meant to guide management, articulate standards for management effectiveness, set in place goals and procedures for performance manage-ment, strengthen the link between salaries and accomplishment and create other performance incentives, and establish training and develop-ment programs to enable workers to adapt to the requirements of a changing workplace.

Accordingly, AdPG reviewed and adopted a set of management prin-ciples in the fall of 1995. The first charge to MDAG, led by Vice President for Human Resources Joan Doig and Director of Training and Development Lynn Manka, was to organize a three-day conference for the purpose of enlisting the help of senior managers in the process of carrying these principles into practice. This was the conference at which Shapiro and Henderson addressed 126 managers.

A series of forums on specific issues and initiatives is meant to improve communication with and among managers. The first, held February 26, focused on Princeton's compensation program, and particularly the use of annual raises to reward merit. A second forum on April 9 featured an exchange on PDI.

Among MDAG's continuing goals are the establishment of an ongoing program of management education, the development of a program of performance management that addresses Princeton's particular needs, and the delivery of training specific to emerging workplace requirements.

"As we strengthen administrative processes, it is very important to encourage managers to think creatively about their own roles and about how to engage their staffs in the process of innovation," said Doig.

PDAG

Princeton's existing computer systems are characterized by redundancy, isolation, complexity and even obsolescence, according to PDAG. But recent technological advances have made possible the creation of a campus-wide network of local databases--a system of "distributed computing"--that offers the potential to create a coherent architecture of data and systems across campus.

In a report completed this past fall, PDAG recommended not only that Princeton move toward distributed computing, but that in doing so it redesign its systems around core functions rather than existing admini-strative structures, with an eye toward simplifying operating processes. They predicted that this effort would yield savings sufficient to justify the cost of the necessary investment in new technology.

PDAG's findings were largely endorsed by a review committee engaged by the Provost's Office, which urged gradual implementation of new systems in order to permit assessment of potential administrative savings in each area. President Shapiro appointed University treasurer Ray Clark to lead the effort to develop a plan for implementing distributed computing: Partnership 2000 (or P2K).

Both Clark and Vice President for Computing and Information Tech-nology Ira Fuchs emphasize that a plan for more efficient administration must drive any initiative for revamping computing--not the other way around.

"We all agree that we should have good business reasons for any new system," says Clark. "It should realize savings or allow us to work more productively."

"If we simply buy systems and insist that they conform to our current ways of doing business, we'll have wasted an important opportunity," says Fuchs. "But if we make available the data we need to do our jobs better, we'll open up ways to innovate."

Clark is working to define the needs of core administrative systems and leading discussions with outside vendors offering comprehensive software packages. Using software packages rather than developing individual systems may sacrifice some local utility, he says, but will enable the creation of more coherent and supportable systems campus-wide.

Administrative areas facing signi-ficant computing challenges that are likely to be addressed by an immediate transition to distributed systems include finance, research and project administration, and academic depart-ment management.

The success of distributed com-puting depends in part on identifying a core of University data; creating common definitions for those data; and creating protocols for entering, updating and accessing them. Julie Shadle, director of administrative systems for Development, is chairing an advisory committee on data administration. This committee is working with Richard Pickett, director of data management for CIT, on defining this data set and discussing questions of access policy. Pickett is also leading an effort to design what he describes as a "data mall," a read-only repository of current University data.

As they frame the transition to distributed computing, Clark and Fuchs are also working on the immediate challenge of ensuring that Princeton's operating systems and applications survive beyond the year 2000, a date many existing systems were not originally designed to handle.

PDI, while formally unrelated to the P2K plan, frames a complementary objective: establishing standard hard-ware and software for administrative computing, so as to maximize the efficient use of resources devoted to larger administrative systems, local networks and desktop units, equipment maintenance and staff training.