Case Study: Strengthening Student Services Through Operational Efficiency
By proactively addressing inefficiencies in our processes and workflows, universities reduce unnecessary burdens while building greater trust and meaningful connections among students, staff and faculty.
Vaden Consulting supported a college within a large public university in improving the effectiveness of its mission-critical services, guiding students through complex institutional and state licensure requirements.
Challenge
Over the course of nine months, the office for teacher preparation had experienced significant staff turnover, driven largely by inconsistent processes and a lack of role clarity.
Rather than backfilling the empty positions, the school’s leadership sought a proactive approach to thoroughly understand what challenges and gaps existed across their various processes and service touchpoints.
Objective
To strengthen the office’s operations and service delivery by assessing and redesigning its organizational structure, processes, and student touchpoints to be more effective, efficient, and student-centered.
Solution
Our work began with a comprehensive review of the office’s existing workflows and processes, including roles and responsibilities, workloads, documentation practices and other service workflows. To better understand its various touchpoints, we also facilitated a mapping initiative to capture how the office and other partners within the college work to support teaching students throughout their student journey, from admission through graduation.
Engagement with stakeholders across the college was also critical to surfacing any operational challenges and ensuring our suggested improvements would be grounded in service realities. As a result, we built cross-unit connections to ensure every voice was heard.
Our recommendations included a new staffing model that better aligned its services with the students’ needs and experiences. This led to the creation of a new generalist role to provide direct student advising, support licensure processes, and act as a flexible resource across the team. In addition, we created a prioritization of the operational processes that needed to be revised, streamlined, or formalized.
Results
Since adopting these organizational recommendations, the office has taken significant steps toward optimizing its operational efficiency and improving the quality of its service delivery, including:
Enhanced opportunities for student advising
Consistent workflows with a formalized standard operating procedure
Increased visibility and coordination across student and college touchpoints
Continuous feedback mechanisms to provide ongoing data and insights
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