This flip chart page documents one of the first brainstorming sessions for the UCOP Efficiency Review.

President Napolitano wraps up the most notable successes from the UCOP Efficiency Review’s first 12 months, measures that have reduced costs, boosted transparency and improved OP’s services.

Dear Colleagues,

My goal for the UCOP Efficiency Review, which this month reaches the end of its first year of implementation, is to reduce costs, boost transparency, streamline workflows, eliminate duplication and improve the quality of service for both OP and the campuses.

While I am the one who put it in motion, the Efficiency Review’s success has always rested with you. It depends on your ideas, your openness to trying new ways of doing business, and your continuing commitment to ensuring that the Office of the President provides the best possible service at the lowest possible cost.

The spirit of the Efficiency Review is one of self-reliance, innovation and service. It offers us an opportunity to continually question the way we work and to answer with improvements and new thinking, no matter how long we’ve been doing something the same way.

By any measure the Efficiency Review had a successful first year. You submitted hundreds of ideas and we successfully implemented 34 of them. Many more are being reviewed and I’m optimistic that next year we’ll be able to step up the pace of implementation.

As we forge ahead into the Efficiency Review’s second year, I wanted to take a few moments to highlight some notable successes from the last 12 months. These five items were among those that most effectively helped UCOP achieve the Efficiency Review’s goals.

• The plan to move the IT data center out of UCOP’s offices in the Kaiser building will save $600,000 a year from the time the move is complete in 2016 and increase efficiency by allowing us to consolidate our IT infrastructure into fewer locations. It will also allow UCOP to house data servers and other IT infrastructure in more environmentally sustainable quarters.

• Moving our performance evaluations on to a single, online system produced a dramatic improvement over the previous, paper-based method. The new evaluation process makes it easy to track employee goals and achievements, imposes much-needed standardization and accountability on managers and increases transparency in an essential and sometimes challenging part of our work life. It also allows UCOP to reduce paper use and storage, which makes our operations more environmentally friendly.

• Simplifying and updating UC’s policies and delegations of authority was an impressive effort that significantly improved UCOP’s service offering, increased transparency, eliminated duplication and streamlined workflows. The ECAS team meticulously combed through existing policies and rescinded or consolidated 201 of them, bringing the total number down to 319. The team created a template for policy writing that includes contact information for relevant subject matter experts and assembled the policies into an online catalogue that includes a frequently asked question section. The team also deleted 1,134 delegations of authority and incorporated 24 more into senior leaders’ roles and responsibilities, leaving just 118.

• As you know, I take sustainability very seriously, and I’ve pledged to make UC carbon neutral by 2025. UCOP took a small step in support of that goal when we installed electric vehicle chargers in the Franklin building garage. These charging stations, which are in near-constant use, will lower fuel costs and greenhouse gas emissions for UCOP staff who drive EVs and get them to work faster by giving them access to high occupancy vehicle lanes.

• Another notable success was the drive to unsubscribe from publications that are no longer read or that are addressed to employees who are no longer on the payroll. So far, mailroom staff have collected more than 13 bins of unwanted mail and had UCOP removed from the mailing lists of almost 400 companies. This project helped reduce paper use and will increase the mailroom staff’s efficiency by cutting the amount of time it spends sorting unwanted mail.

While I’ve singled out these five, each of the nearly three dozen projects we started this year contributed significantly to making the Efficiency Review a big success. If you’re curious for more detail about the others, please visit the Link website. All the monthly announcements can be easily found there. And, thanks to your dedication, there are many more ideas awaiting review and possible implementation. Look for my first announcement in January for more details.

Please keep thinking of new and better ways for UCOP to operate and please keep submitting your ideas to the Efficiency Review website. In closing, I want to thank each and every one of you who contributed ideas and who jumped in to help make UCOP a smarter, more sustainable, more effective and more efficient workplace.

Yours very truly,

Janet Napolitano
President

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