Sharing UniForum project findings

The UniForum project has reached a significant milestone with the sharing of the first data collected during the cross-campus initiative. The first wave of findings was shared at two townhall sessions this week, that attracted hundreds of participants.

This is the first year McMaster participated in the annual program to better understand how we provide services that support the academic mission, and how we compare with other institutions around the world. McMaster is one of over 40 universities in four major countries participating in the work.

Earlier this year, those involved in support services and activities participated in a two-phase data collection process that gathered information about specific time spent on various support functions. Approximately 350 staff coded 11,000 records, tracking time investments in areas like, finance, human resources, student recruitment, research administration, and others.

“As a new member of the McMaster community, I’m impressed with the collaboration and cross-campus involvement in this project. I’m interested to see what we can do with the data, and believe it will help us make more informed decisions about the future of the University,” said Provost David Farrar.

Findings of the first year of the process include:

• McMaster has chosen to support teaching, learning and research in a mainly decentralized, localized structure
• McMaster has one of the highest percentage of full time employees supporting the academic and research mission, with a low use of third-party suppliers performing these services.
• As a research-intensive University, McMaster has diverse and broadly distributed research administrative supports in various areas of the University
• Administrative services across the University are focused heavily on providing transactional, day to day activities, vs. strategic, long term planning.

The findings of the first year of data collection reinforce the recommendations made during service reviews undertaken in Research Finance, and IT.

The intention is to use learnings from both Uniforum and the service reviews to become more effective and efficient in the work that’s done to support the mission and vision of the University. Through Uniforum, the university has detailed functional and activity-based data that provides insights, some familiar and many insightful, on which to base our future decisions.

“Thanks to the high level of participation across the University, we now have an abundance of information that helps us better understand how we provide support services” said Roger Couldrey, Vice-President Administration. “Each year, we’ll be adding to this data, and be able to become even better at supporting the teaching, learning and research activities of the University. Thank you to everyone involved for your efforts and contributions in this important work.”

Next Steps:

Senior academic and administrative leaders will now review detailed data for each of the functional areas. There may be some short-term initiatives taken, based on the data, in response for example, to the service effectiveness survey. Other initiatives are likely to take place on the recommendation of the responsible leaders in the longer run.

We hope to learn from our first-year results and the experiences of other institutions, so we can begin to use our data for long term decision making. We’ll also prepare for the next round of data collection in 2018. 

The townhall presentation will be posted on the Uniforum website in the coming weeks. If you have questions about the results, or would like to learn more, contact the project team at uniforum@mcmaster.ca