Meeting Six

Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Attendees

S. Baum, E. Cardinal, M. Concepcion, J. Hornak,  E. Lincoln, S. Maggelakis, G. Mendola, H. Miller, S. Provenzano, M. Purcell, A. Ray,  K. Schmitz, L. Shields, H. Ward,

Agenda

1) Discuss Trustees Meeting

2) Break into Research Subgroups that will address the specific points we have identified as needing work in order to make RIT more agile (See OA Guiding Principles below). We will continue to keep the current Wednesday meeting time and space as a placeholder for the various subgroups. But each group should feel free to arrange their own meeting schedule as an alternative to this time should you wish. We want to use the next few three weeks to collect relevant information from within the institution, as well as from other comparable universities that are also facing these issues. Our goal is to identify specific and concrete actions that will enable RIT to be a more responsive and agile university.  

Research Subgroups: Our goal is to identify specific and concrete actions that will enable RIT to be a more responsive and agile university.  

1- Identity (We need a FOCUS. Develop a clear and universally understood definition of RIT’s identity and strategic direction.)

1. Margaret Bailey

2. Enid Cardinal

3. Ed Lincoln

4. Matt Purcell

 2- Collaboration (Based on this focus we create a real collaborative and interdisciplinary structure and culture for student/faculty/staff/alumni, break down barriers that create silos.)

1. Gary Mendola

2. Howard Ward

3. Sophia Maggelakis

4. Joe Hornak

5. Cindee Gray

 3- Transparency (Responsive and increased transparency, community engaged resource allocation--budget, space, human resource)

1. Amit Ray

2. Lauren Shields

3. Milagros Concepcion

4. Andrew Phelps

 4- Flexibility (Curricular and Financial Flexibility—take risks, stop running on the margin, minimize bureaucracy, streamline compliance measures, empower local decision making responsibilities.)

1. Stefi Baum

2. Rico Peterson

3. Sue Provenzano

4. Jean Casares

5. Beth Prince-Bradbury

5- Community (Respect/faith/ trust across the RIT community of students, faculty, staff and alumni)

1. Lynn Wild

2. Kim Slusser

3. Heidi Miller

4. Katie Schmitz

5. BJ Hoerner

Minutes

Notes from OA Co-chairs presentation to Board of Trustees Finance Committee (April 10, 2014)

Howard provided an overview of OA Task Force work and noted two themes that have arisen:  transparency and interdisciplinary. He then introduced Amit to present the slide.

1. We need a clear and understood definition of RIT’s identity and strategic  direction . 

• We’ve had so many initiatives over the last several years that diffuses understanding and has us moving in too many directions.
• We need to focus in a deliberate way.
• Break down barriers/fix silos
• It’s been difficult, but we have made progress.
• There are underlying deep structural issues

1. Any expansion /restructuring  should be based on  this shared direction
2. Budgetary decentralization and transparency

• Need community input up and down
• Budget, space, and human resources need to be more transparent and more 2 way communication with input into the decisions
• Stop running on the margin and streamline bureaucracy
• Take risks, RIT is too risk averse
• More financial flexibility

1.  Curricular flexibility (hand in hand with finance)
2. Empower those who have responsibility to have authority to make decisions
3. Respect/faith Trust across the community

`Finance Committee Discussion and clarification:

• Decisions should be at the college and department levels
• Question:  Can you quantify risk?
• From business perspective, sounds like a license  to have cost explosion
• All boils down to communication.  There is more government compliance required these days and that results in some level of bureaucracy.  Need to better communicate why we have to do it.
• Re Fixing silos:  Communication is key, but it is hard to develop collaborative work across colleges.
• We are poor at reallocating to match resources.  If a student changes starts in one college and changes to another, not credited to the new college.  Resource re-allocation does not follow.
• University of Michigan is more flexible.
• What are next steps?  Fact finding to benchmark, will look at University  of Manitoba, Georgia, etc.
• Conflict between number one and local decisions.
• Takes significant risks to achieve that.
• Curricular flexibility:  faculty positions that extend across colleges, tenure decisions, authority gets diluted?
• College structures undermine these opportunities.

• Sounds like a culture issue

• Faculty don’t like to take risks to jeopardize tenure.
• Interdisciplinary research and collaboration are important part of culture we need to build.
• We have inherent conservative nature and operating on the margin prohibits innovation.
• Create a fund—potentially have department return discretionary funds to get it started.
• Should interdisciplinary college be formed to create more collaboration ?  Is that creating more silos,  or maybe have a resident in a department with interdisciplinary role.
• How do we change the nature of the deans territorial realm?
• Want you to think more about structure and reporting lines.
• Are barriers for compliance for us higher than others?

OA Meeting Minutes

• Enid:disparity between what was being reported and how it was being received. Discussion on risk was interesting. This was interpreted very differently.
• General vibe from the board was that mission statement needed to be bold. Want to push for more vision. Don’t need to do everything the same but better. The Plan needs to be transformational.
• Discussion of BOT reactions to the report.
• Budget structure and Budget distribution that restricts interdisciplinary interactions and rewards disciplinary and silo.
• Taking risks that aren’t compliance/government related but on how we make decisions and how we do business.
• Finding ways to come out of the silos and create these curricula and programs. 
• Gary: Pockets where we are doing these things now. And where we have tried and failed.
• Process of iteration rather than a checklist/product based mentality.
• How can we respond to the ‘cost explosion’ issue? Find business practices that respond to this issue.
• Concern—who is going to manage the budget.
• More flexibility within the budget process. Not fully decentralized, but where people can identify themselves and their priorities within the process.
• Focus means what areas can we be internationally renowned.
• Opportunities in places such as Center for Multidisciplinary Studies—self-designed curricula
• Matt: in 10-15 years what is the advantage to coming here? 
• What is the value proposition? This is our guiding principle and what would it look like? 
• Budget allocation process that doesn’t reward college for a university achievement. Only entry is calculated. Not point of exit.

• Inflexible Curriculum may end up diminishing our value proposition. That students can come here and and have all of these disciplines available to them.
• Questions of community. Extending the discussion to Rochester. The strengths of the area.
• Students used to like having the major at the get go.
• Milagros: Budget zero-corporate approach which is an incremental approach
• WHAT IS OUR VALUE PROPOSITION? We have a greater than 95% placement rate. We are confident in this rate. Not all colleges can say this. We have 87% response rate.
• Placement. You will get a job.
• You will become fluent in high end technological practices. You will gain hands on experience in the classroom and in industry. You will be able to 
• We don’t just want competencies. We need more on the types of people we create. The citizens we create. Critical thinking. Ethics.
• Value proposition for the lifecycle of the student from choosing the place to succeeding to looking back favorably.
• Examine individual cost centers. Each of these areas may have multiple possible solutions. 
• Proposing transformational change in two months is a problem. The speed of the process is very worrying. Worst time of the year for the faculty.
• Shared governance is unhappy with Academic Senate.
• Self governance is an issue. Both Staff and Faculty are feeling left out of the process.
• Sophia: shared governance. faculty don’t bother any more. Know they are discussing changes to tenure policy. But still say they are too busy to be involved.
• Faculty meet once a month in their colleges. Senators need to communicate better. Needs to work within existing structure that faculty already deal with.

• Senate has to set the expectations of the Senators.

Meeting Five

Date: Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Attendees

S. Baum, E. Cardinal, J. Casares, M. Concepcion, J. Hornak,  E. Lincoln, S. Maggelakis, G. Mendola, R. Peterson, A. Phelps, B. Prince-Bradbury, S. Provenzano, M. Purcell, A. Ray,  K. Schmitz, L. Shields, K. Slusser, H. H. Ward, L. Wild

Agenda

This week we will assess our top five points in order to ascertain the best ways to move forward with information gathering from within the institute and from other institutions that have initiated such change. Our goal is to issue concrete prescriptive actions that we can undertake in the coming years. 

We have received materials from a number of you that pertain to what other schools are doing. These are included here:

1) From Stefi: 

At University of Manitoba they are seeking to reorganize to become more agile and to be able to take better use of interdisciplinary opportunities

and to save administrative costs. http://umanitoba.ca/admin/vp_academic/media/ASI_Presidents_Letter_Jan_2012.pdf

They started by organizing themselves in "collaborative clusters." http://umanitoba.ca/admin/vp_academic/media/ASI_Collaborative_Clusters.pdf

(Just a note they have 27,000 students and are looking to form into 5 colleges.)

2) From Gary: 

I have attached an interesting article from the Stanford Bio-X Program.  It demonstrates that you can have interdisciplinary activity at a University with many colleges (seven at Stanford).  I think that this is both an interesting article and technology, and a great example of interdisciplinary activity at its finest.  Stanford has achieved interdisciplinary activity by both faculty and PhD candidates –the PhD students, I am told, increase this type of activity as they interact with others campus wide. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/biox-numb-pain-021914.html

In addition, here is some additional information on the Bio-X program.  I believe that there could be more cross-silo work in Sustainability Institute Hall (and it sounds like some of the other folks on our team would agree) and I would think that the new Wegmans School of Nutrition and Wellness would offer opportunities in interdisciplinary activity as well. http://biox.stanford.edu/clark/

3) Lynn has suggested a couple of free webinars that discuss some of the key issues higher education will be facing in the near future. While I haven't had a chance to watch them, I'll ask her speak to their content on Wednesday.

Minutes

• Jean: are these actions items? We need to turn them into action items
• Editing the slides. Discussion and refining.
• Andy’s laundry list. This place is additive. Nothing ever comes off the table. "RIT strives to be an excellent private, career-focused, undergraduate, research-applied, impactful, scholarly, entrepreneurial, online, digital, blended, student-focused, experiential, specialized, technical, innovative, creative university for the 21^st century."
• Matt points out that for him only the first three things were important.
• Enid, each group should set up a mission statement.
• Despite branding study, our identity is still muddled. 
• Brand study- career focused, technological and specialized. 
• More global, more engagement, and more creative.
• Palpable sense that you are not trusted by the university. Not clear as to why. Major micromanaging from above. 
• Entrepreneurs categorize risks to things differently. They have tons of skin in the game. A lot of the decision makers are insulated from these risks.
• The feeling is that we are just afraid to take risks. But what are we afraid of?
• FA feels trusted. But they are a unit that is not encouraged to take risks. Sofia, this is mostly in academic side of the university.
• We weathered the rough times. Need a balance between when we need to be risk averse and when we need to take risk.
• The stability of our fiscal management has overrided other decisions.
  
  
  This is the slide we submitted for the Board of Trustees meeting. We revised and refined these items into a series of points that will make up our agenda as we proceed.

These are the revised points which we will use as the guiding principles for our Research Subgroups moving forward. These points formed the content of our presentation to the trustees.

Meeting Four

Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Attendees

S. Baum, J. Casares, E. Cardinal, C. Gray, B. Hoerner, J. Hornak,  E. Lincoln, S. Maggelakis, G. Mendola, H. Miller, B. Prince-Bradbury, A.Phelps, S. Provenzano, M. Purcell, A. Ray,  K. Schmitz, L. Shields, K. Slusser, H. Ward

Agenda

This coming Wednesday we will be breaking into two groups. One group will consist entirely of faculty and one entirely of staff.

Staff will speak to the lifecycle of staff and students, faculty to the lifecycle of faculty and students. (Matt, we would like you to move between the two groups in order to facilitate discussion.) Each group will consider the following:

1) What is agility from these different points of view? In what ways do these perspectives align or diverge? 

2) Given these conditions what top five essential elements that will make RIT a more agile Institution?

Minutes

Definition of organizational agility at RIT

• The university acts with shared focus and priorities, responsibility, accountability, values and resources
• The university expands and contracts in response to and in anticipation of internal and external stimuli
• Shared information, collaboration, open communication and transparency are expected

Tentative, yet to be distilled list actions needed to become an agile organization

• Respect, faith and trust in one another
• Conduct a campus-wide assessment in order to sunset programs, services, processes, technology and policies that impede organizational agility
• Empower people to ensure that decision-making is made at the appropriate level
• Centralization of

• Marketing and communications
• Student services – advising, financial, one-stop point of contact, etc
• Space allocation
• Enhanced professional and career development for all employees

• Clarified role of shared governance bodies
• Flattened organizational structure/fewer organizational units
• Streamlined operations
• Refined overall budget process
• Create a margin of resources that enable expansion and contraction of resources
• Maximize and leverage technology
• Hold people accountable for outcomes

Image 1: Staff Breakout Group Notes

Image 2: Faculty Breakout Group Notes

Meeting Three

Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Attendees

J. Casares, M. Concepcion, C. Gray, B. Hoerner, J. Hornak,  E. Lincoln, S. Maggelakis, G. Mendola, B. Prince-Bradbury, A.Phelps, S. Provenzano, A. Ray,  L. Shields, H. Ward, L. Wild

Agenda

1) Report from the Presidential Roundtable

2) Refining our mission statement

Minutes

• Amit reviewed some of the discussion/input from the members of the President’s Roundtable

• The plan should address the perceived lack of career mobility among alumni

• Is this perception true or simply anecdotal?
• We need longitudinal evidence to support or refute this perception
• Partnership with LinkedIn may help

• Discussion around organizational agility

• Decentralization vs. centralization

• Which promotes the greatest organizational agility?

• SIS system capabilities for demand modelling to facilitate scheduling of courses and rooms
• The current system has the capability…we just need to change the business rules
• Discussion of registration and modeling. On demand scheduling.
• Problems in doing this would be related to personnel and resource agility. More Resource Agility required across colleges. At a university level.
• How about delivery models? 

• More flexible workforces. And this needs to be done in a better way than just more lecturers. Problems with lecturers. Accreditation, Rankings, Research. Each new TT hire decreases teaching capacity.
• Facilities. New Buildings. Academic Governance and flexibility.
• Space is not handled in the same way budget. Space is college-centric. And how transparent is this process? It isn’t. People pass the buck as to how these decisions are made. 

• Decentralize coordination of space and charge of it. That would make the the process transparent.
• Each course, # students, tech needs, deliverables. 

• A lot of decisions around money and space would be answered with a demand based registration system.

• Demand based modeling system that helps us assess where the demand is. Would help with on-time graduation. Would help with student loan debt.
• Need to revisit curricular rigidity with faculty. Unfortunately, semester conversion made curriculum more rigid. Intersession is not a remedy for this due to financial aid restrictions.
• We’ve always been decentralized as an Institution in many ways. Budget, Space, Programs. Prided ourselves on that. Generates a grab and hold-on to it culture.

• Revenue Generation/Cost Containment TF suggested a central pool of resources. Why can’t administrators share assistants. Get the report from Milagros

• Need to frame these issues not as reallocation but as agility. Fear of losing something is a barrier to agility.
• Why do we keep making colleges? Because if you are not a college, you don’t exist. Dean’s council, Senate. Governance and reporting structure means that you are a written out if you are not a college.
• From co-op to a broader definition of experiential learning. Do some of this in house. Capstones in SE. 12 IT students are enlisted by ITS to build a front-end to Oracle's registration system.
  
  
• Resource agility would include:
• Funding, people, space – the ability to move them around the university as needs and opportunities arise – not necessarily permanently, however
• Cross-training of people
• Labor loaning
• One suggestion for reducing barriers created by the current “accounting” system is to change from a FTE based resource allocation model to a credit hours generated model.
  
  
  

Meeting Two

Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Attendees

S. Baum, E. Cardinal, J. Casares, C. Gray, J. Hornak,  S. Maggelakis, G. Mendola, B. Prince-Bradbury, S. Provenzano, A. Ray,  L. Shields, K. Slusser, H. H. Ward, L. Wild

Agenda

1. Recap of previous meeting

2. Three Questions for the Presidential Roundtable on Thursday (submitted by co-chairs, see below)

3. Overview of Dean Winebrake's Liberal Arts Position Paper

4. Discussion of how best to organize focused Information Gathering/Research sub-groups

5. Brainstorming session on RIT Student 2025

Three Questions from the Organizational Agility Task force

1) To what extent does the college and program-based organizational structure of RIT restrict the Institute's organizational agility? 

2) What are most effective steps the Institute can take in order to better respond to the complex, transdisciplinary nature of our most pressing social and environmental issues?

3) Higher Education has seen rapid expansion of bureaucracy and administration in the past two decades. What concrete steps can we take in order to mitigate these factors?

Minutes

• Meeting began with a quick review and debriefing from the last meeting
• The meeting included a great deal of discussion on a variety of topics related to organizational agility
• Some themes that seem to emerge

• What are the barriers to organizational agility?

• Structure
• Communication

• What are the effective means of reducing or removing those barriers?

• Request based registration system (ala Virginia Tech) should be examined
• Removal of barriers between and within colleges
• Not seeing the curriculum as a series of “check boxes”

• One idea that would assist us in creating a vision of RIT in the future would be to have focus groups of students who

• Have been successful in reaching the end of their educational career
• Have been less than successful in reaching the end of their educational career

• What are the elements of organizational agility?

• Interdisciplinarity
• Focus (vs. being spread too thin)

• The group spent time discussing the proposed three questions for the President’s Roundtable discussion

• The group thought it might be a good idea to ask the Roundtable members about their experiences (positive and negative) with organizational agility

• One comment was to incent the behaviors that you want

• How do you engage your staff in promoting or enhancing organizational agility?
• How do you align organizational agility with accountability and customer service?

• The group spent time brainstorming the RIT graduate of the future

• Insert Amit’s notes here

• Action items

• Revise charge statement
• Review and prioritize student of the future brainstorming results
• Brainstorming an “agile RIT” via wiki

Meeting One

Date: Friday, March 14, 2014

Attendees

M. Bailey, S. Baum, E. Cardinal, J. Casares, N. Fein, C. Gray, J. Hornak,  S. Maggelakis, K. Mayberry, G. Mendola, R. Peterson, A. Phelps, B. Prince-Bradbury, S. Provenzano, A. Ray, K. Schmitz,  L. Shields, H. Ward

Agenda

• 1. Introductions (completed)
  2. Strategic Plan Mission and Vision Statements(Kit Mayberry led this discussion)
  3. Organizational Agility Dimension Statement
  4. Planning Matrix: Timeline and Deliverables
  5. Definitions of Organizational Agility
  6. Suggestions developed by Strategic Planning Committee (we would like to start with a clean slate)
  7. Internal and External factors specific to our organization
  8. General Discussion of items 6 - 8
  9. Break into subgroups to identify 2-4 key elements for the Taskforce’s focused consideration

Minutes

Kit’s Intro

• Reassures us that the working mission has been determined by many people.

• Consideration of the different pressures impinging on the industry.
• One of the areas: What are today’s and tomorrow’s careers? Answers are different from a decade ago.
• Employers want T shaped workers. Breadth in addition to technical skills.

• NSSI survey. What we learned about our students. Dropped off in a number of categories. 11% of freshman spent max. time relaxing and socializing and 9% of seniors did this. 11% spend of frosh spent 0 hours reading for coursework. And 10% of seniors.

• Mission Statement: We are going to give our students interdisciplinary experiences of theory and practice.
• Vision: blends new things. Imagining and creating.

• Making experimentation by students easy. Not going to happen if we don’t find a mechanism for doing this.
• Some examples we might want to think about.
• UNH and UW-Madison give competency credit. 
• Wildly interdisciplinary programs at Duke combining neuroscience and literature. Stanford’s BioX.
• Risk that we just complain. But as Sofia points out this is a major opportunity.
• Not necessarily more stuff but facilitation/manipulation of what we already have..
• A strategy around organizational agility. How do we deliver on these matters?
• In Steering Cmmte and TownHall, they took for granted agility and see what kinds of ideas they might generate. How do we fix things so such activities can happen?
• OA is a dimension of the process. It might not be a standalone pillar of the SP.
• Offer up suggestions and rationale/supporting strategies. How do these things support the vision.

Talking Points:

Organizational Agility Dimension Statement – add the following:

System or system approach; being adaptable enough that RIT can evolve without needing to change

Definitions of Organizational Agility:

• Enterprises capacity to deal with change
• Efficiency of an organization to respond to change
• How does the presence of a beauacracy impact an organization’s ability to deal with change?
• The F&A side of the organization feels as if they are agile due to their revenue driven practices.  Academe side of RIT is more conservative and perhaps less agile.  The university is a large system and it should not be thought of as the F&A and the academe side of the organization.
• We are a very compliance oriented organization and quite risk adverse – this seems counter to an agile organization.
• Space utilization is a vital issue at RIT and it inhibits our ability to be agile as an organization.
• The structures within RIT do not seem to support the premise of organizational agility – things get done now because of personal relationships and collaborator spirit. 

General Discussion

• Excessive structure and beaucracy and its impact on organizational agility
• What should be centralized and what should not so that we could function more efficiently.
• How can colleges promote interdisciplinary academics and scholarship?
• Do the metrics reward the silo approach? 
• How does the austerity financial model used within the academic side of the organization effect our ability to be organizational agile.
• We want to do x but the budget is sunk into y.
• Push back on the notion that our problem is that we don’t have an endowment.
• Very difficult for an organization to be agile when the state of our financial health hinges on the tuition dollars of 100 students.
• As an organization we are trying to do too many things without the needed resources.
• Top down versus bottom-up
•  
• Maybe look at what we do well as an organization in regards to agility
• What are other models within other universities in as far as budget and space for example?
• Stanford has an interdisciplinary model (BIO) where faculty and students share space from different disciplines and collaboration emerges.
• ACTION:  Stefi will circulate PowerPoint on encouraging cross-interdisciplinary research and education initiatives.
• Enid mentioned that UB has a good example of promoting interdisciplinary work. 
• What does organizational agility look like? What are the metrics that we would use?
• We don’t seem to have shared goals.
• The budget process seems to inhibit agility. 
• Too many things going on and too little resources can result in an over stressed organization who exhibit lack of trust and limited bandwidth and organizational fear.

Determined 4 key areas for breakout discussion groups.

Discussion Groups:  Organizational Agility Rubrics

• Transparency and communication (Beth, Sophia, Margaret)
  • Sometimes people complain of too much and too little communication.
  • Too much stimuli is problematic
  • Strategic and deliberate communication system needs to be developed in light of stressed and very busy community
  • Create a communication matrix or protocol to help guide a communication
• Excessive bureaucracy (Katie, Gary)
  • Compliance focused and therefore that makes us risk-adverse; we should attempt to make RIT more flexible
  • Change is not being rewarded (there is a slow response time for authorization, consider reallocation of funds we have to support constant change)
• Centralization and decentralization (Enid, Cindee, Joseph, Lauren)
  • Some services seem to make sense to centralize, such as IT support
  • Reorganize to reduce administrative bloat
  • Space centralization beyond the department and college level and move to the university level
  • Do away with the college structure and support only departments (example of ASU)
  • Change the metric from FTE to credit generated
• Interdisciplinary work and Collaboration (Sue, Steffi, Jeanne, Nancy)
  • Need to have a better system of creating shared goals
  • Improve our program assessment and refinement
  • Combine colleges and encourage collaboration
  • Some units that have been created to promote collaboration and interdisciplinary work has actually added to the problem

Discussion Items

Action Items

• @mention a person to assign them an action item and notify them.