uniforum@sfu

UniForum - Year 3

SFU's What's Next strategy prioritizes transforming the SFU experience and eliminating barriers and bureaucracy that hinder faculty and staff from doing their best work.

The UniForum program, now in its third year, will be a valuable tool to help us achieve this goal by identifying areas of improvement, streamlining processes, and supporting decision-making, all with the goal of enhancing the overall service experience for the university community.

Through performance indicators and best practices, the program compares SFU's services with other participating universities, helping us remain competitive and responsive to the evolving needs of students, faculty and staff.

We are working with Cubane Consulting to ensure the data collected is analyzed and interpreted meaningfully, which will help us make data-driven decisions and take targeted action to enhance the overall community experience and drive organizational performance.

We’ve identified some areas for collective improvement and growth with the strategic objectives of reviewing organizational structures and processes, clarifying and enhancing services and transforming the user experience. These initiatives include work on central finance processes, IT customer satisfaction, and communications support.

Leaders of a number of service areas at SFU are now beginning to use UniForum data, along with other inputs, to pilot improvement projects in these and other areas.

The program benchmarks administrative services that support academic and research work but does not benchmark functions representing teaching for credit courses and conducting research.   

PARTICIPATING STAKEHOLDERS

Participating stakeholders are university administrative staff across SFU’s faculties and departments that assist with data collection by assuming the following roles:

• Respondents enter administrative activity data, according to a common set of activity codes, into the UniForum@SFU software (this software system is called UFAST). Respondents generally code for five to fifteen people.
• Primary Contacts perform an initial review of the activity coding entered by Respondents, looking for potential errors and anomalies. 
• Function Reviewers perform an overall review of the activity coding by examining the data on a ‘function’ level. Examples of administrative functions are HR, Facilities, and Finance. This overall review is conducted as a final check to verify the data prior to its submission to Cubane Consulting for analysis.

Contact us

If you have any questions about the UniForum program, including clarification of key dates or technical issues with the UFAST system, please contact our program team at uniforum@sfu.ca.

For any other information, please email one of our project team members below.