Where Are We on UniForum?

I’m excited to be back in touch with you to report on the UniForum program. We’ve been busy collecting data these past few months, and I…

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Gitta Kulczycki, Vice-President (Finance and Administration)

I’m excited to be back in touch with you to report on the UniForum program. We’ve been busy collecting data these past few months, and I want to thank everyone who has participated in the program so far.

A few new activities will start up in the coming weeks. In addition to encouraging you to participate, I want to take a moment to let you know where we’re at in the process, how the program has gone so far, and how the different pieces of UniForum will eventually fit together.

You likely recall that in For the Public Good, we committed to continuously improving the administrative, governance, planning and stewardship systems that enable us to achieve our shared strategic goals. To help advance this commitment, this past fall the U of A embarked on the UniForum program — a multi-year exercise to better understand our administrative services and activities.

How does it work?How does it work?

We’re currently collecting data on our administrative support services — that is: not on particular units, but on end-to-end services that span the whole university. UniForum will help us to analyze the data we collect, but it also allows us to compare our results with other universities across Canada, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

You can read more about the program here.

We started into UniForum back in November, 2018 with a service effectiveness satisfaction survey. To everyone who participated in the survey, I want to say: thank you. Your feedback and input are instrumental.

We received many rich responses, especially to the open-ended questions. We are now starting to review the results from that first survey, and to look for concrete actions that will improve users’ experiences with our administrative services.

There are two more activities starting up in the coming weeks:

First: Part Two of the service effectiveness survey will start on May 6, 2019. Part Two looks into services that were not included on the first survey. If you are selected as part of the survey sample group, I encourage you to participate — your input and insights are very much appreciated.

Second: the other component of the UniForum Program, which is called Activity Data Collection, will begin June 3 and continue through part of the summer. This component will help capture data on how support services are resourced across the university. You can expect to hear more about this component shortly.

We expect to get high-level results from both the surveys and the Activity Data Collection in December of 2019, and to work on analyzing those results through the Winter and Spring semesters of 2020. At that point, we will be able to see where we are doing well, where we can improve our administrative services, and what we can learn from other institutions.

I look forward to working together with you on this project,

Gitta Kulczycki
Vice-President (Finance and Administration)

More on UniForum:More on UniForum: