Administration, Finance, and Operations Resource Center
With growing price sensitivity, demographic shifts, and increased competition, colleges and universities are experiencing unprecedented financial pressure. The Administration, Finance, and Operations Resource Center compiles EAB research to help higher ed leaders increase institutional efficiency, manage campus space, achieve growth goals, and make smart investments with limited resources.
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People and Workplace Culture
Refine Your Institutional Budget Model
Institutions’ budget models often fail to reinforce campus priorities and commitments, instead locking them into damaging cost structures, underfunding strategic priorities, and creating harmful incentives. Campus leadership teams need to (re)design a customized model that aligns institutional resources with strategic goals and bolsters long-term financial performance.
Build a New Budget Model that Advances Your Institution’s Strategic Goals: Our Roadmap shares how to design custom budget models that align with your institution’s unique strategic priorities, mission, and culture.
Contain Costs in the Near- and Long-Term
As institutions face tightening budgets and uncertainty about future revenues, campus leaders are seeking opportunities to mitigate unnecessary costs and increase financial efficiency across every part of the enterprise: labor, technology, facilities and auxiliaries, spend and contracts, academic affairs, and administrative workflows.
The Essential Guide to Cost Containment Strategies for Higher Education: In this resource center, we’ve catalogued near-term and long-term tactics for cost containment across five functional areas of colleges and universities.
Redesign Outdated Processes
Higher ed institutions are riddled with paper-based processes, shadow systems, duplicative tasks, unnecessary handoffs, and redundant approvals. To increase efficiency and free up time and capacity for more strategic activities, campus leaders can deploy process improvement practices to reengineer work and build a culture of continuous improvement.
Process Improvement Resource Center: Explore resources designed to help you jumpstart process improvement efforts on campus.
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Boost Efficiency with Shared Services
Shared services centers offer institutions an opportunity to improve efficiency, boost service quality, and reduce compliance risks by absorbing administrative work from campus units. However, there is no one-size-fits-all model so campus leadership teams must design and implement their own structure and approach that will advance their campus priorities.
Design a Shared Services Model That Reflects Campus Priorities: Rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all model, institutions should create a shared services structure that strikes a balance between two factors: the efficiency of process standardization and responsiveness to units’ service expectations. This Roadmap addresses the four major design elements that affect this balance, all in the context of advancing campus priorities and goals.
Strategically Monitor Financial Performance
Facing unprecedented financial pressures and ever-growing institutional ambitions, it is critical that institutions have the underlying functional capabilities and infrastructure in place to navigate new financial realities.
Build Financial Dashboards to Communicate with Boards and Other Stakeholders: This Roadmap outlines how to select key financial performance indicators, display those metrics in a dashboard, and encourage stakeholders to engage with the data.
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Tackle Capital Project Planning and Design
Given technological innovations, new operational realities, and shifting stakeholder expectations, university physical space must rapidly evolve. This will require campus leaders to stop viewing space solely as a cost center and instead make targeted investments in campus spaces to advance strategic goals, like sustainability and efficiency, interdisciplinary innovation, student success, and diversity and inclusion.
Enhance Your Capital Project Planning Process: Follow the steps in this Roadmap to improve transparency around capital project prioritization, identify new funding sources, and speed up project approval and execution.
Address Deferred and Preventive Maintenance
Colleges and universities have faced maintenance challenges for decades, but tightening budgets are making it even more difficult for institutions to replace or renovate aging buildings while also maintaining newer “smarter” buildings that require more frequent and complex upgrades. Institutions must adopt a methodical approach to address critical deferred maintenance backlogs and simultaneously invest in and expand their preventive maintenance programs.
Improve Preventive Maintenance Performance: Discover how to invest in and expand preventive maintenance programs to avoid future failures and reduce the deferred maintenance backlog.
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Improve Space Governance and Utilization
Today’s higher education space demands are more complex and costly than ever before. While institutions have historically accommodated changing needs with renovations or new construction, this “build to grow” mentality has become increasingly unsustainable amid declining revenues and rising operational costs. Campus leaders must embrace a more principled approach to maximize the use of existing campus space, which will require new policies and procedures around space governance, allocation, and reallocation.
Working with Academic Leaders to Improve Space Utilization: Explore nine best practices to inflect behavior change and improve space utilization rates.
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Promote Campus Sustainability
Higher education institutions are facing heightened stakeholder demands and external pressures to achieve ambitious sustainability goals. Campus leadership teams must develop more focused, cross-unit action plans to maximize the ROI of sustainability efforts.
Compendium of Sustainability Initiatives in Higher Education: Browse over 100 higher ed sustainability initiatives, complete with prioritization guidance and higher ed case studies.
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Create a Holistic Campus Safety Strategy
Historically, most institutions’ campus safety models were police-centric. But given the growing complexity of campus safety needs and constantly changing stakeholder priorities, institutions need to embrace a more holistic approach. This will require leaders and campus units to share safety responsibilities, incorporate the needs of various constituents (e.g., faculty and staff), and embrace a more multi-dimensional view of safety, including emotional and psychological safety.
Manage Campus Climate Flashpoints: Follow these four steps to prepare for and respond to climate-related incidents that can cause heightened levels of activism, media and public scrutiny, and reputational damage.
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Support Your Facilities Team
Campus facilities remain a top priority for institutions. Students continue to prioritize the campus in their decisions about where to enroll, and investments in campus space are an essential component of achieving broader institutional ambitions like sustainability and operational efficiency.
Yet, Facilities organizations are stretched thin, facing staffing challenges, heightened stakeholder service expectations, budget constraints, and ever more complex systems to manage. To overcome these challenges, institutions must develop core facilities management capabilities around data, communications, staffing, and partnerships.
Grow Your Facilities Talent Through Upskilling Programs: Discover how to build in-house talent development programs, from determining the focus and operational plan, to staffing the program and recruiting candidates.
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Modernize Your Research Administration
Institutions are facing increased administrative complexity and burden amid heightened competition for extramural research funding. As a result, campus leaders must streamline their approach to managing research grants and more effectively communicate about research costs and impact.
Modernize Research Lab Design and Management: Follow the steps in this Roadmap to collaborate with facilities, research, and academic leaders to develop a more proactive and integrated campus strategy for designing and managing research labs.
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