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What follows is a summary provided by MU College of Engineering Dean Elizabeth Loboa and team. Dean Loboa shared this success story during the May 2 Collaborative Design Session.

The 萌妹社区 College of Engineering recently underwent a series of changes intended to streamline and restructure our administrative structure. We began this process in 2017 and, to date, it has led to several key improvements in the College alongside a few drawbacks and growing pains, all of which will be outlined in this document.

One of the most important steps in this process was improving the efficiency and efficacy of our reporting structure. This helped simplify our chain of command and created several key benefits including:

• A reduction in the number of supervisors
• Flattening of the organizational structure, which has benefits outlined in the Harvard Business Review article 鈥溾€�
• Elimination of one-to-one relationships 鈥� i.e. supervisors overseeing just one employee
• Improved accuracy, increased speed, expanded responsibilities and advanced effectiveness
• Fewer layers between employees and management

Centralizing our undergraduate advising operations was another massive shift in our operations. Prior to this restructuring, academic departments handled undergraduate advising, and they all had different methods of handling this task. Bringing all the undergraduate advisers to a central location, reporting to a single director, provided great improvement. Students immediately saw the benefits of the changes, in particular the standardized advising approach across all areas of the College. We also were able to create cost savings by reducing the number of advisers needed from nine to five and an additional half-time employee.

Mizzou Engineering also centralized its financial and administrative support units. We moved these staff into one centralized office, allowing the College to have all fiscal and administrative support in one location.  Working in close proximity and in their specific areas of strength, resulted in our staff being more effective and successful at tasks such as expense reports, one-card transaction reconciliation, financial statements, event coordination, visa processing, graduate student applications, promotion and tenure coordination, etc. Instead of focusing on a broad spectrum of activities in support of a single department, these staff members now focus on fewer activities in support of the entire College.

This process has dramatically increased control of funds, lowered the potential for costly errors, increased efficiency and effectiveness and led to a multitude of additional improvements, including:

• Reducing staff touching financials and performing transactions from twelve to four
• Decreasing number of staff touching HR transactions from eight to two
• Reducing the number of authorized signers
• Ensuring no funds leave the College without the dean or director of finance seeing the expense
• Standardizing financial statements, which are supplied to department chairs on a monthly basis
• Allowing two financial analysts to meet with the chairs monthly to discuss trends and projections
• Providing high-level financial statements to all faculty and staff each month
• Providing analyses of their accounts (RIF, educational support) to faculty monthly
• Standardizing of processes such as graduate student appointments, supply ordering/checkout, course evaluations, and seminar coordination
• Centralizing course scheduling to more efficiently utilize space
• Utilizing student workers to provide front desk and routine administrative tasks

There are several important items to consider and evaluate before implementation of such streamlining processes.  First are some of the issues and/or drawbacks that may be encountered.  In the College of Engineering鈥檚 case, these included growing pains 鈥� some members of the faculty and staff were unhappy early in the process as the 鈥渒inks鈥� were worked out.  In addition, layof