A key part of continuous improvement culture is "finding the bright spots" -- looking at who has had success making changes and operating differently. Small changes can make a big difference!
This bright spot illustrates a process of improvement that has spanned four years, changing a little bit more with every cycle, and a result of a partnership between Financial Reporting and Communications in UVAFinance.
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The Issue:
Dating back to its time as “the Comptroller’s office,” Financial Reporting & Operations has been committed to making UVA’s Annual Financial Report more useful and timelier. The Annual Financial Report is a massive undertaking, requiring collaboration between central finance, UVA partners across Grounds, and the Medical Center, and involving extensive review and auditing. The report was produced, edited, and printed by outside firms with University Communications handling the project.
From October through December, the Annual Financial Report process was often one of late nights, high stress, and looming deadlines.
The Improvements:
The first step in this ongoing process was instituting careful project management within the comptroller team and adjusting the timeline, which resulted in the production a finished report three months after the fiscal year close instead of six.
The next fiscal year brought another improvement: the design and printing of the report were moved in-house. UVAFinance Communication’s Matt Bonham recreated the report from scratch, working with Financial Reporting’s Thomas Schneeberger, and Printing & Copy Services printed and bound the report.
In subsequent years after moving the report’s production in-house, Communications and Financial Reporting collaborated to make other adjustments to the process, instituting version control, procuring Adobe InDesign for Financial Reporting so they could enter financial data into the report’s framework, adjusting the report’s narrative content and design to better suit UVA’s needs, and enlisting a whole host of in-house reviewers to double-check data, grammar, and style.
The Benefits:
With every move the UVAFinance team made to bring the production of the report closer to the source, efficiency and flexibility increased.
The institution of careful and streamlined project management meant that internally, the team had more time to review the report and anticipate auditors’ questions, and externally, the BOV could review complete financial statements in December instead of February.
Moving the report in-house presented an initial heavy lift, as Bonham had to build a new source file and the Coms team and PCS had to work through all the little details of moving the report from an electronic file to a sleek finished product. The first year of in-house production had its ups and downs as the team learned how to manage the initial level of data entry and many subsequent rounds of edits.
The addition of InDesign for the Financial Reporting team meant that the thousands upon thousands of numbers filling the report's tables and pages were more likely to be correct from the outset. Jacob Mair of Financial Reporting took on the task of putting each new year’s figures into the framework Bonham produced. Mair’s expertise ensured that the first layer of data in the report was correct, and the system of versioning control meant that the edits coming in from multiple sources were captured accurately. Mair and Bonham developed a system for editing, design, and assembly that streamlined the process further.
The addition of expert yet still “outside the project” reviewers from Financial Reporting gave another layer of quality control to the report. Using PCS to print the report meant that the team had a longer lead time before turning the report over for printing, and a safety net when last-minute changes inevitably occurred (PCS once reprinted and swapped out a page from the already-bound report!).
As the team had to worry less about completing the required pieces of the report, they found they had more time to refresh the design and think critically and creatively about the report. Having more wiggle room within the project cycle and more control over the project itself allowed the team to adjust some of the report narratives to be more meaningful and to experiment with new features, such as an online, interactive version of the report. The team was also able to provide more flexibility in the timeline for necessary higher-level review from UVAFinance leadership and the EVP-COO office.
The Bottom Line:
Producing UVA’s Annual Financial Report will never be a breeze. It is still a complex process with many moving parts, tight deadlines, and a lot at stake in terms of correctness and compliance. However, through the collaboration of departments within UVAFinance and partners across Grounds, the annual cycle is close to an automated process, and experts in each area of the team are now able to more meaningfully shape the report without as much sweating over process details.
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