How Universities Work

CHAPTER 12 Managing Improvement

126 Chapter 12 Managing Improvement Once built, a performance model focused on improvement requires an implementation plan. Often, models of effective operation produce elegant documents and much data but fail to engage the difficult task of implementation. University administrative and budget decision systems, built up over years of incremental change, resist systematic overhaul, and university guilds often resist most forms of productivity and quality management. Improvement and Resistance to Change External constraints also inhibit change. In most public universities , legislatures and policy boards have rules, regulations, budgetary policies, and accounting and reporting procedures that may conflict with the data elements and goals of a performancedriven management model. In these cases, the process of reconciling such differences often sinks the accountability process with barely a trace and at best adds an additional layer of resistance to change. Managing Improvement 127 Private universities with more clearly defined missions and some history of self-sufficiency often adopt these practices more quickly, not only because of their institutional history but also because their goals and governance structures remain aligned. Public universities have multiple versions of institutional goals, they have multiple and cross-cutting governance structures , and as a result, they find accountable change difficult. In most cases, the public system chooses a method of high visibility , multiple reports, conferences, and task forces, all accompanied by minimal action and less improvement. The successful implementation of a performance process that creates incentives for improvement often requires public universities to operate in ways familiar to multinational corporations , which must also function in complex and inconsistent environments. The technique involves the maintenance of different reports for different purposes: • On one side, the university meets all the requirements for reporting and accounting required by external constituencies , government agencies, governing boards, and the like. • On the other side, the university manages its internal operations in accord with the reports required by its performancebased budget. Multinationals often do essentially the same thing. They report their performance in formats that meet local government regulations, but they also maintain a set of consolidated company reports that permit them to drive the corporation’s quality and productivity on a consistent worldwide basis. Any effort in a public university to reconcile the external requirements of government agencies to the internal drivers of quality and productivity will almost surely derail the performance process, because the state’s interest in the management of higher education almost never focuses on questions of high performance and national competition. Many states also have 128 HOW UNIVERSITIES WORK the traditional resistance of the civil service bureaucracy to incentives and rewards for performance, preferring instead to support across-the-board and formula-based resource distribution systems. The most important element in the implementation of a performance-based model such as the one described here is a commitment to make it work. That means that the president or chancellor and provost must do what the method they have endorsed says they will do, and the governing board of trustees must support the effort. When the performance system says that the university will reward productivity and quality according to a specific set of measures, then the institution must reward that performance. When the measures demonstrate a lack of productivity or quality , the university cannot then lose its nerve and make an exception by saying, “Oh, my goodness, we didn’t expect that it would cause our favorite college to lose a reward.” At the same time, if the university is to be explicit in its allocation of rewards, it must also be prepared to demonstrate to all unit heads or deans where the productivity of their colleges failed to improve and why the quality data do not justify a reward . This permits a dean to challenge the data, although in most cases, in a well-run system, the productivity data are quite objective and the quality data come from sources already defined and approved by the college leadership and its faculty. Some of the incremental adjustment in a unit’s budget may well be negative, following a failure to meet quality or productivity expectations. The university can withhold funds to fill vacant positions, reduce support for unproductive research programs, or, perhaps most significantly, identify new leadership for an underperforming unit. Most academic guild masters, such as deans and department chairs, have long experience with administrative innovation. They know that strong, if sometimes passive, resistance and various forms of delay can often end...