Over the course of the next few weeks, UBC will be embarking on an exercise to better understand our current distribution of services and activities, in support of the university’s academic mission.
The program, known as UniForum, will involve collecting information from across our university and benchmarking it against other higher education institutions. Forty-two institutions from Britain, Australia and New Zealand have already taken part in this program which is conducted on an annual basis.
Our goal is to better understand — at an organizational level — how we deliver which services, where those services are, and how we might enhance our service delivery to improve the faculty, student, and staff experience.
The information will be gathered in two steps:
- In May, we will be asking managers and supervisors of specific teams to help us gather a full picture of the range of services and activities across the university.
- In late May, all faculty and staff will be invited to take a survey and provide feedback on their experience and satisfaction related to 35 core services (identified as part of the program).
Information gathered through this process will enable us to benchmark ourselves against other universities of similar scale and complexity. It will also help UBC work towards developing better practices, informed by experiences from participating institutions.
The information we gather in this first year will be a resource for many conversations to come — not an answer in and of itself. In the fall, we will begin a series of conversations to explore what the data suggests and how it can be used.
We have already begun discussions with senior leaders across the university, in preparation for this first wave of the UniForum program. Thank you to all those who have supported the initiative so far — and to those managers and supervisors who will be assisting with the information gathering process.
If you have questions or would like more information, please visit http://pair.ubc.ca/uniforum or email uniforum.help@ubc.ca.
Andrew Simpson
Vice-President, Finance & Operations
Angela Redish
Provost and Vice-President, Academic pro tem
Lisa Castle
Vice-President, Human Resources
Deborah Buszard
Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal, UBC Okanagan