Phase 2: Ideal State

Timeframe: 6 months

Intake

We immediately advanced into Ideal State assessment by taking the process areas and doing a cardsorting exercise to organize them into 5 main categories. We did a lot of analysis in advance by reviewing the relevant processes and the SME lists, brainstorming with the facilitation team, and projecting how much time we would need to use for each activity. 

Research:

Each category was given a 2-3 week session where we gathered 15-20 SMEs representing all parts of campus in a Zoom room every day from 8:30am-12pm. 

Methods

We had 6 main activities that we lead the groups through:

• Current State Review/”Waste Walk”

  • We tagged opportunities for improvement with hashtags and identified areas of waste, improvement, and consolidation

• Process-System Improvement Models 

  • The PSI model is similar in concept to a Service Blueprint, but with a focus on policy and process considerations and process improvement.

• Ideal State Brainstorming

  • Clustering exercise where we used Lucidspark to allow everyone to brain dump their ideas, via virtual sticky notes, about how to improve our current state. We would then collaboratively cluster them into emergent themes. 

• Requirements

  • During the course of each session, we had a Business Systems Analyst listening for requirements which were periodically reviewed and vetted by the group.

• Benchmarking questions

  • We brainstormed big questions that we would ask our sister UC campuses and the listserv of the Association of American Universities as further research.

• RACI chart

  • We projected who the Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed parties would be across the university and the UC system for each of the proposed process changes.

Challenge

Two solid weeks of workshops every single morning make for a grueling marathon for both SMEs and facilitators. We were on a very constrained timeline to get all 5 completed between February and July, so had to stay on top of our schedule while mitigating burnout.

Solutions

• Scheduled tightly with a 3-9 day break in between each session to give the facilitators a little time to decompress and prepare for the next session. 

• Kept the schedule exactly the same each day with two 10-minute breaks at a regular interval. During the meetings, we had a strict timekeeper who would call the time and facilitate entertainment during the breaks. Everyone was able to take regular predictable breaks that they could count on. 

• Kicked off each day with an opener that would provide an opportunity to learn a new tool in a creative way, or connect personal stories to process improvement concepts. This gave everyone a chance to connect or learn in an entertaining way.

• Though the schedule timing was rigid, the itinerary was not. Each of the 6 activities could be swapped in and out in the way that made the most sense for the content we were covering that day. 

Challenge

• SMEs would sometimes bring up new issues that were tangential to the work we had prepared or suggest that we needed a specific SME to be present to discuss a topic. Rarely, we would discover that there was a variation process map that we had missed. 

Solutions

• We instituted daily debriefs for the facilitators each afternoon so that we could more quickly pivot to address any new concerns or curveballs that came from that day’s session. 

• We also held a mid-point check-in with each group after the first week in order to have an opportunity to communicate and course correct in case anything was going off the rails. 

• Both of these really helped us to keep our SMEs engaged and reinforced their trust in us that we were truly listening to them and evolving our activities, sometimes right on the spot, to respond to their concerns. 

• We also held a retrospective on the final day of each session in order to reflect, celebrate, and improve both the content and the facilitation methods for the following session. 

Outcome

We completed all 5 sessions on schedule for our July deadline, engaging 85 SMEs. We tagged 600+ improvement ideas, generated 150+ benchmarking questions, and recorded 530 requirements.  This work is currently being brought forward for the next phase of the project, Future State.

This has been the biggest process mapping effort the university has ever conducted. Our work is being widely recognized by other UCs and used as a template for other major internal projects.