IT Innovation Contest

A team-based contest for creative IT solutions

UCSF Committees Service and Management Portal

Proposal Status: 

Project Description:

This proposal outlines a project for developing, deploying, and supporting a UCSF Committee Service and Management Portal built on the UCSF Salesforce platform and leveraging Chatter capabilities.

 

Faculty and staff provide support to UCSF’s academic mission by serving on a number of research, clinical, and administrative committees, and their active participation is critical to achieving the institution’s goal of advancing health worldwide.  Currently, there is no single, quick way to determine the number, composition, context, collaborative relationships, and charge of the many committees currently convened at UCSF or what actual impact they have on the success of the enterprise. For example, if one wants to identify existing resources or forums to help move along a specific goal or facilitate a specific decision, there is no existing repository that helps identify that.  UCSF needs a tool that provides quick and easy access to enterprise-wide committee information to senior leadership, committee chairs and members and staff.  The following are key components that such a tool must address:

  • Have committees completed their charge and if so, they should be disbanded?
  • If committees are currently active are they still relevant?
  • Do standing committees make sense or is there efficiency and effectiveness in convening short-lived, task/decision-oriented task forces and/or work groups?  
  • How can a committee’s or committee member’s completion of service and/or work product be appropriately and efficiently acknowledged?
  • How can committee staff work be coordinated more centrally and efficiently?
  • How can ongoing, centralized collaboration be promoted and facilitated?

The UCSF Salesforce platform offers key features to facilitate committee management, such as standardized contact records for all UCSF staff and faculty (fed by EDS), single sign on through MyAccess, Chatter group and activity streams, support for file versioning, and the ability to leverage evolving Salesforce functionality (less need for costly customization).  Building a committee management tool on the UCSF Salesforce platform will allow users to access all relevant data related to committee management in order to efficiently support the organization, maintenance, and decision making processes for Committee Chairs and Managers (staff support) as well as key Executives needing insight about committee efficacy and outcomes at UCSF. 

 

Deliverables:

This project will deliver a web based application using the Salesforce platform that will:

  1. Track relevance of committee charge, purpose, and oversight
  2. View, organize, update, and track tasks and data related to committee management (e.g. agendas, notes, attendance, completed action items, etc.)  
  3. Identify who is currently serving on what committee(s) and in what capacity
  4. Determine how many committees individual members are serving on and from what departments members are being pulled
  5. Track terms of service and manage committee member rotation
  6. Record and report on “credit” for committee service
  7. Manage and archive committee communication
  8. Produce committee analytics
  9. Communicate data with Advance and the Academic Senate’s Service Portal

Impact and Rationale:

A centralized repository and service/management portal will have universal impact and:

  1. Minimize administrative burden on all members of our community
  2. Provide up to date information and documentation Allow committee staff to centrally facilitate and manage administrative functions simultaneously for multiple committees
  3. Assist leadership in evaluating existing committee model as well as individual committees and make data informed decisions regarding the need for further investment and/or action
  4. Classify and convene appropriate groups depending on input needed, decision to be reached, or work to be accomplished
  5. Eliminate duplicate committees
  6. Reduce in-person meetings
  7. Create a foundation for collaboration across departments

Measures of Success:

  1. Stakeholder support and use of the tool
  2. Enterprise-wide acceptance and use of the tool (estimated at 3000+ users)
  3. Reduction in the use of listservs associated with committees
  4. Ability to report on membership and activities across committees 

Team Members and Estimated Time Commitment:

Nina Jameson—Salesforce Product Manager (10%)

Suya Colorado-Caldwell—Chancellor/EVCP Committees and Special Projects Coordinator (20%)

Salesforce Developer—TBD (80 hours)

Comments

An excellent tool for committee structures and maintaining continuity across the board. This is a resource I would definitely utilize in my work.

This is a real timesaver on many levels - not only through consolidating information but - even more importantly - enabling informed decision making around committee purpose and value. It will go a long way toward helping to identify duplication of work and also help folks to understand if their committee members' time is better served if the committee is changed to a task force with a more detailed charge and specific end date. If the average committee at UCSF consists of ~20 people, the time savings would be tremendous.

Excellent means to eliminate duplification of work and assess time spent to result.

Non-academic senate committees are already using Chatter for many of the reasons outline in the proposal. Agree that it helps with many of the management and participation aspects of serving on a committee. Having a record of the discussions is also a very valuable feature. Seeing the superstructure and having the ability to drill down to individual committees and subgroups would be very beneficial.

This would be a very excellent tool if information is accessible by department leadership. It could help determine if faculty and staff are over committed (do the same staff and faculty serve on more than necessary -- how many are too many). Mentioned in this proposal is a need to track relevence -- how is this determinec? This is forward thinking as it can help to aggregrate data regarding committee work.

Ditto the supportive comments below. Very helpful to avoid duplication when looking to start a new committee. It would be helpful if historical information on committees that have closed down could be posted, with a contact person, so that departments wanting to start a new committee to resolve an issue could see what work has happened in the past, and know who to contact to find out more, get copies of reports, etc. Having this tool will not only help with identifying individuals who may be overburdened (before we invite them to join yet another committee), but also help to identify others who could be invited instead, who have relevant experience from other committees. This tool could be easily adapted to track and support the wider range of external workgroups and committees that we support. This would be extremely useful. We would love to see this functionality built.

Innovative idea to leverage technology to help us do our jobs in a SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timely) manner. Having done this by excel spread sheet and email/phone calls for a long time, this is overdue. So much of what we do is run, reviewed, or considered by committee governance. This would ensure we're selecting from UCSF's broad talent base with a smart approach.

This represents what is possible given the combination of time, human resources, and technology! This has been a historical need that can now be met. I echo the sentiments above and reiterate the multi-faceted benefits to tracking efforts of the several individuals who have volunteered and contributed both expertise and time on campus committees as well as making committee efforts as efficient as possible. This will help avoid over subscribing individuals for committee work.

Salesforce is great way to systematically track and update information - as programs grow, it is way too difficult to keep using excel spreadsheet. Furthermore, it allows us to create reports, which is much needed. Tracking, updating, and reporting system is something that UCSF should have to be more efficient.

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