The Finance Leadership Team Examines Continuous Improvement Across the University

The Finance Leadership Team recently discussed Continuous
Improvement in action around the University. The team broke out into groups and
answered two questions:

1.What are some specific CI behaviors or results
you’ve observed on your individual team? 

2. In what ways could you be more intentional in
encouraging CI behaviors?

Here’s a look at what they had to say regarding observed CI
behaviors:

•  Increased flexibility and creativity.
•  Moving in-person training to online. This has
  been well received and participation has increased.
• Persistence in encouraging one another to use
  new resources and tools.
• Creating consistency in new initiatives.
• Technological innovations for reception and
  hosting spaces. 
• Salesforce.
• Communication: being aware of who is on your
  team and what they can do; capitalizing on peoples’ skills.
• Building repeatable processes: don’t just
  respond to immediate requests/problems, figure out a way to prevent them in the
  future.
• Getting better at documenting processes and
  storing that documentation so that the whole team can easily access it.

When asked for ways to be more intentional in encouraging CI
behaviors, the Leadership Team offered the following suggestions:

• Constantly evaluate how your team can make customers' lives easier.
• Never stop asking questions about current processes (e.g. Why do we do that? What is the value of this process?)
• Set aside time to celebrate improvements.
• Champion new efforts and ideas.         

How have you seen Continuous Improvement in action within
your department or unit? If you can think of anything not on this list, please
feel free to share it with us in the comments or post about it on the CI Community Hub.