About Affected Campus Units:

A university is a modern complex organization, composed of diverse organizational units each attending to specific functions in support of each other and the whole. Accordingly, no unit is an island, isolated from others. Inter-relationships and dependencies exist among and between the units, necessitating continuous communication and exchanges of information. Activities in one’s own unit affect affairs in other units; developments in other units affect operations in one’s own unit.

In many cases exchanges between units are formal and well documented. For example, an academic unit completes and passes along a Personnel Action Form to authorize the Human Resource Office to begin the search process for a new employee. In other cases exchanges are more informal--perhaps verbal. An example is an instructor in one department agreeing personally to deliver a guest lecture on a topic of particular expertise in a class of another instructor in another department.

While there is surely no objection to informal arrangements between different units, such informal arrangements can become problematic in situations where they are expected to continue on beyond the short term. Changes in staffing may cause knowledge of the arrangements to be “lost” to the university. Or, the nature of the arrangement may be remembered differently by staff within different units. Indeed, one of the great challenges for a complex organization is how to formalize institutional knowledge, document it, and make it available to diverse stakeholders as needed.

In this respect, it often happens that when a given unit makes new plans, enacting those plans will impact the activities and work load of another unit. Sometimes (especially with staff changes), the affected unit is not aware of the change state being affected by plans in the given unit so it is not prepared to smoothly assume its support role for that unit. Although the first unit’s activity had been planned, the affected unit has not been communicated with about the development with adequate lead time to make its own internal arrangements. A disconnect occurs that sometimes adversely affects clients of the organization.

A simple hypothetical example illustrates the possibility. Suppose a science department plans to develop a new curriculum offering in, say, forensic medicine. Plans are carefully laid that include 25,000 square feet of new laboratory space along with appropriate new faculty lines, library holdings, office space and the rest. Demand for the new program is robust; numerous lab sections are filled to capacity; the labs are used 18 hours/day. It’s necessary to clean the labs thrice daily to evacuate noxious fumes and rotting body parts. Prudence would suggest that the science department should have communicated with the custodial department so that it would have lead time to arrange adequate custodial capacity to meet the emerging need of the new curriculum.

For this reason units are obliged to indicate within the Strategic Planner whenever any new planning objective is likely to affect the work or plans of another organizational unit. The unit planning a new objective will indicate the nature of the impact that is expected to affect another unit. In this way, other units running reports at will should discover listed automatically all the developing objectives across the university, by department, that might, in the view of the original planning unit, affect its own future supportive work load. Adequately notified, other units across campus my plan their own future in support of the first unit’s new plans.

As units complete the appropriate data entry in the “Affected Campus Unit” window, other units are immediately duly notified of any expected impacts. The comprehensive capacity enables every unit to easily monitor plans of all other units and identify well in advance any impacts that may be headed their way.