Situation:
Engineering Student Services (ESS) has a high volume of work, complex situations, and many new team members, all of which were driving factors behind ESS seeking support to evaluate their processes to identify opportunities for efficiency and streamlining.
Our Actions:
- Completed a situation assessment to build a shared understanding of all the processes within ESS
- Defined academic advising and developed a set of principles to guide the approach
- Formed a working group that ensured representation from key stakeholders across Engineering
- Interviewed other advising units for best practices and templates
- Developed all supporting documentation to enable the implementation of the new approach and recommendations for efficiency
- Provided recommendations to other areas of ESS that were affecting the performance such as communication
Results:
- Recommended activities that have been prioritized
- Enhanced resources from the Faculty
- Greater transparency of procedures and policies within ESS
- Tools and templates were created to help ESS to ensure the recommendations have an action plan for implementation and are well documented
- Enhanced awareness among faculty and staff of challenges, progress towards goals and outstanding achievements across the unit
"We appreciate all of the help and support that the team at Strategy Decision & Support (SDS) provided to help the Faculty understand how student advising is currently happening, and how it could be optimized across all of our BASc programs. Their helpful guidance, experience and tools made it possible to explore this challenging and important area, to create strategies which will improve the experience of students, staff and faculty."
-Jody Swift, Director, Special Projects and Strategic Initiatives, Faculty of Applied Science