All work
Redesigning a high-volume compliance process
The challenge
Staff, academic units, and students each calculated the financial figures on the document differently. That led to errors, confusion, and reissued documents.
What I did
- Mapped the current and future process, then piloted the new one with a small group of advisors, academic coordinators, and students.
- Gathered feedback, adjusted, and built the new process, workflows, resources, and trainings.
- Led a change campaign that reached hundreds of stakeholders.
- Recommended standardizing the figures instead of calculating them case by case. No regulation required that level of individual calculation, and standardizing matched peer-institution practice.
- Worked through staff adoption, alignment across units, compliance risk, and training at scale.
The result
Fewer inquiries, faster processing, fewer errors and reissued documents, and adoption across units.
By my own estimate, a typical document went from about 20 minutes to about 8. I left the role before formal metrics were compiled, so these are my observations.
What I took from it
Standardizing a process only works if the people using it help shape it. Piloting with advisors, academic coordinators, and students, then adjusting before launch, is what got every graduate program at the university, nearly 100 in all, to adopt the same way of working.