President Napolitano provides an update and announces the latest improvements she’s asked the Efficiency Review Working Group to begin implementing this month:

Dear Colleagues,

Last October, when I launched the UCOP Efficiency Review, I was confident it would help make the Office of the President a more efficient organization and a better place to work.

Almost a year later, I’m happy to say that thanks to you, the program has done even more than I’d hoped to improve OP’s effectiveness. I’ve been inspired by your embrace of the process, which is obvious from the hundreds of ideas you submitted for boosting OP’s efficiency. We’ve successfully implemented quite a few of those ideas and we’re forging ahead with even more.

The current Efficiency Review Working Group has done a wonderful job of launching this effort and leading the implementation of many great ideas that have made OP more efficient and effective. To build on our first year’s success, we have decided, on the current Working Group’s recommendation, to refresh the group’s membership. As we embark on our second year of seeking efficiencies at OP, new leadership of the group will allow the program to move forward with new energy and fresh thinking, and it will allow new people to take advantage of this opportunity for leadership and cross-office collaboration.

So I’d like to encourage any of you who are interested to apply for membership in the new Efficiency Review Working Group. If you’d like to be part of the team leading this essential program, please submit your application by Wednesday, Oct. 8.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the current members of the Working Group for their year of hard work. This was a demanding assignment and each member rose to the occasion with valuable contributions. And, their work is not quite done, as they will serve for another year as an advisory group to the new Working Group.

I’ll update you on the new Working Group membership in next month’s announcement.

I’d also like to announce two noteworthy Efficiency Review actions.

1) Meeting room status reports: Thanks to an idea from the recently formed Executive Assistant Focus Group, the status of a meeting room will now be included in the auto reply email that is generated when the room is booked. From now on, whenever a problem with a conference room is reported, the issue will be entered in the Outlook system. If, for example, the projector is broken, a connector cable is missing or the room’s conference phone is malfunctioning, that information will be included in the email. That way, whoever is booking the room will be alerted to the problem and know that it has been reported for repair or other solution. We all attend a lot of meetings, and I’m hopeful that this will make booking rooms less frustrating.

2) Simplification and update of policy development and Presidential delegations of authority: The Universitywide Policy Office has been working hard for more than a year to simplify and improve the way UCOP develops, reviews and approves Presidential Policies. The office has conducted a detailed review of existing policies to make sure they are accurate, current, written in plain English and conform to the five-year review cycle. As a result of the review, 201 policies were rescinded and/or consolidated, cutting the number of policies to 319. The Policy Office also created a standard policy template that includes the contact information of a subject matter expert available to answer questions. The policies are now available in an online library that also includes an FAQ section, a segment for recently updated policies and information on how policies are reviewed and approved.

In addition, leaders in the Office of Ethics, Compliance and Audit Services streamlined the Presidential Delegations of Authority framework by deleting 1,134 delegations of authority and incorporating 24 more of them into senior leaders jobs, leaving 118. And they’re not finished, as these remaining delegations of authority are being reviewed for possible further changes.

I want to thank the ECAS and Policy Office teams for this remarkable work, which will make Presidential Policies easier to find and use, and ensure that we have the right delegations of authority and policies in place to guide us in our work. I’m also grateful to those of you who called the Efficiency Review team’s attention to the situation.

Thanks again to all of you for your commitment to making UCOP more efficient. Please keep the ideas coming, and I’ll be in touch with further news next month.

Yours very truly,

Janet Napolitano
President

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