From Melody's Desk: What's Next for UVAFinance?

Dear Colleagues,

You may have heard that finance will be one of the next areas of emphasis as UVA continues its goal towards organizational excellence. Just as UVA is committed to innovation in the classroom and lab, this fall, we will begin a multi-year effort to transform to the workplace of the future. This project will include modernizing our job skills and daily tasks, enhancing the great service we provide to our stakeholders and implementing state-of-the-art technology to provide excellent financial support, solve problems and build stronger connections.

The purpose of my message today is to share with you what we know about the upcoming journey as we move forward together into UVA’s third century.

The Finance Strategic Transformation

We describe the upcoming work in this way because it most accurately reflects what we want this process to be: “strategic” because we will identify the best and most impactful ways to improve how we support education, research, and patient care in a modern-day, streamlined, and dynamic workplace, and “transformation” because it’s a re-imagination of where and how we deliver services, what technology we utilize, how we are connected across the entire University and how we think of our roles on teams.

The journey we’re undertaking will be adapted to finance and to UVA; it is not modeled after any existing transformation. We are just beginning to plan and develop how future service will be delivered, what a future financial organization will look like, and how we will invest in your professional development. We haven’t defined the entire process now from start to finish but will communicate with you and all of our stakeholders frequently.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we know now about the Strategic Transformation:

• We will develop and manage the skilled and professional financial workforce needed for the future, enabling our finance teams to grow professionally. This is not a force reduction.
• We will optimize service delivery and strengthen relationships within the finance community across Grounds while identifying the best place for financial work to take place, wherever that may be located. 
• We will streamline business processes to improve outcomes and eliminate steps that do not add value. It’s about saving time and effort, enabling us to focus on mission-critical activities. 
• We will implement and support technology that will better enable us to do our jobs and allow us to deliver excellent service, to grow strategically, and to responsibly steward UVA’s resources.

I know you probably have questions, some that will not have answers yet. We will learn a lot more as we begin to plan this work. And I promise we will keep you up to date both in the UVAFinance blog and on the newly refreshed VP Finance website when it goes live later this year. You can email me and we will look to address those in future communications.

UVA has experienced a lot of transition lately and although the result is desirable and best for the University, it can still be challenging to get there. I’m glad we have an extended team of finance professionals across Grounds that I can count on to share input and ideas as things take shape. In fact, we can’t do it without you – we’ll need your participation and innovation to make this process successful and your patience and collaboration as we determine the best path forward.

So, as we embark on this journey, please join me on the ride. It may be bumpy and the path may not be clear from time to time, but I am confident that together, we will become our best.


Thanks for all you do!

From Melody's Desk

May 4, 2017

Dear Team, 

This April, I had the privilege of addressing attendees of the Spring 2017 Fiscal Officers of Colleges and Universities State Supported (FOCUS).  I shared with the group that one of the major changes underway at UVA is the HR transformation project we know as Ufirst.   My remarks were sparked by a book that Kelley Stuck, the new Chief Human Resources Officer who is leading this change, recommended to me:  The Future of Work, by Jacob Morgan.

Morgan describes future employees, future managers, and future organizations, focusing in particular how work will change with new generations entering the workplace. This is important, because the changes are coming quickly, and, in some ways, already here. In just three years, millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997) will make up over half of the country’s workforce (they already represent around half of the workforce in MRP, SFS, and OSP).  At about the same time, the next generation, born around the year 2000, will be coming to work, and both groups have very different expectations of communication, collaboration, and learning.

What will we do to prepare ourselves for the future state of work?

Starting with our Appreciative Inquiry process, we have begun the process of creating a culture of community, breaking down our traditional organizational groupings into a more connected, larger team:

We have re-organized our administrative, IT, communications, financial, and process improvement teams to work in a more matrixed manner.  We have a biweekly blog, where we share information about new employees, organizational successes, and finance news.  We are focused on employee engagement, collaboration, service excellence, and rewards and recognition.  We have renovated spaces to allow for collaboration, discussion, and exchange of ideas.  We hold regular gatherings, monthly UVAFinance days, and have division-wide training sessions that mix team members together. 

These are just a few steps we have taken to learn to be an organization of the future, and they are steps that have allowed this team to become more close-knit and collaborative.

I would add that we need to continue to explore, fundamentally, why we are here and how we can better enable the University’s mission to deliver exceptional education, research, and patient care . . . what role can we finance play in UVA achieving that mission?  How can we deliver on the promise to be the valued and trusted financial partner that the University community turns to first?

To do this, we will need to make an investment in time, energy and money in three key areas:

·       People:  How do we deliver training and development to current and future employees that Morgan describes as accessible anytime and anywhere, open and transparent, and collaborated and communicating in new ways?  In addition to conferences, formal educational experiences and online experiences, we have created a Management Development Program to look at specific skills needed to be a manager.  We are looking at competency-based hiring and performance evaluation.  We have partnered with a Darden faculty member to create a Leading a Lean Transformation certificate program to instill a culture and provide training on real tools to improve processes.  Next, we want to develop a curriculum to create business analytical skills.  We have held mandatory training on respectful workplaces, multi-cultural fluency, and IT security.  We regularly hold lunch and learn sessions and have developed UVAForward, an annual conference for administrative employees.

·       Processes:  How do we transform from the group that has a focus to enforce federal and state regulations to one that enables innovation, creativity, and discovery while still maintaining compliance, data integrity, and accuracy? We have implemented an incentive-based resource allocation approach to provide information and insight into revenues and expenses at the school level.  We have been learning how to eliminate waste and transform core processes.  We are getting trained on COSO, in order to develop a robust, effective, and appropriate internal controls structure.  We are updating policies and developing a template for standardized operating procedures.  We are working with IT and the provost office to develop an institutional data strategy to provide and govern the balance between compliance and transparency, standardization and flexibility.  We are beginning the process to design a chart of accounts that provides data and information as needed for an executive or board level, but also provides flexibility for data analytics desired by a dean or faculty member.

·       Systems: How do we ensure that core transactional systems can deliver functionality in a way that supports desired service delivery and support the future organizations that Morgan described as connected, adaptable, evolving, and constantly innovating? We are implementing a data warehouse and business intelligence tool, UBI, and an online support community, UBIC.  We are developing our own research administration platform and faculty portal, ResearchUVA.  We have implemented ExpenseUVA, a travel and expense management tool.  We will have WorkDay payroll and are beginning initial thoughts around labor distribution.  We are nearing the selection of a tool to take our budget and planning process out of excel spreadsheets, and partnering with IT to make minor adjustments that will have a big impact on our current financial systems.

There are lots of changes, but with change comes opportunity and uneasiness as we move to the unfamiliar, which is understandable!  It will take a careful balance of paying attention to our people, to our processes, and to our systems, to make this transformation into the “future workplace.”  

I am confident that the UVAFinance Team is up to the challenge.