Good afternoon –
Hope you’re enjoying the last weeks of August. Below are a few items I’d like to highlight this week:
On August 19th, the University Gazette published two articles about our work. The first article, “Early successes help build support for Operational Excellence initiative,” is told from the viewpoints of employees who are shaping the work and enabling success. The second article, “Achieving the biggest goals starts with getting the simplest things right,” focuses on the impact of the Operational Excellence work within the Adams School of Dentistry. I hope you have a chance to read these articles, which are excellent.
Nominations are rolling in for the inaugural Operational Excellence Award (note the award name change), which recognizes the outstanding contributions by a staff member to the advancement of Operational Excellence’s mission and goals. Thank you to those who have already submitted a nomination. If you have not done so but would like to nominate a colleague, please visit https://operationalexcellence.unc.edu/operational-excellence-award/ by the August 30th deadline.
The design teams continue to make progress with the pilots and user testing. More specifically:
- The Travel & Expense Team is refining the new travel website based on feedback from the pilot units.The new site will launch in September – more details to come.
- The HR Team is holding a series of user-tests with student employee supervisors and hiring representatives from across campus to gather feedback on the student employment website. The team previously working on standard principle functions has continued its work independent of Operational Excellence and recently completed developing standard principle functions for IT roles. Position Description Templates for these IT roles will soon be available in the Manager Toolkit on the OHR website.
- The Research Team pilot for the federal playbook with 11 participating schools/units is ongoing and the team is also preparing to introduce the second and third playbooks focused on nonprofit and industry awards setup in the coming weeks.
Lastly, in Hiring and Procurement, the number of transactions less than $250 made using one of these preferred purchasing methods is now above 86%, up from the baseline of 65%.
Please feel free to share this email with your colleagues. You can also visit our website to learn more about Operational Excellence, read my previous updates, and submit feedback. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at wernoski@email.unc.edu. I read every email.
Best,
Rick