reenginering! Mike McCallister 11 Jul 1994 07:56 EST
God save you from reengineering! I know that this "process" has saved several companies, etc. a lot of money and increased productivity. I was at a large research foundation, however, thatdropeed major thousands of dollars in a this stuff, tore itself asunder, and is now (due to leaving the same out-moded adminsitrators in place) quickly reverting to its original form. It was a bummer for the staff. It is true that some changes have taken place, but it is also true that the commitment to really change the organization was not. I agree with the concept of flattening the organization, shared decision-making, and so forth, but if the leaders are not willing to take on some of the pain, too, then your change is doomed to failure. Half implementations of these processes just breed more camels where horses Spankye desired. --------------------------- Original Message --------------------------- Dear resadm-l collegues, We are currently planning a reorganization our office of technology transfer (we have a serparate office for sponsered program like grants). We currently handle pre and post award research contracts with government and industry, patenting, licensing, institutional policies, university-industry relations etc... The basic idea is this. We are looking at the possibility of decentralizing to the dean of the faculties the authority to sign some research agreements and contracts . This would mean that our office would provide standard agreements for our deans and PI's to use in their negociations. Any major changes in the agreements would have to be validated through our office and we could train someone at the dean's office to take care of the minor negociations. Major problems would be referred to us. Our office would keep the responsability of administring the major programs. Faculties would also have to report back to us the agreements they sign to be entered in our data bank. We are hoping from this change to reduce the time-consuming discussions on overheads with PI's and faculties by giving them the responsability and authority to negotiate this issue. Guideslines would of course be provided to all for that sensitive issue! Our office could then be spending more time on tech transfer, making contacts with industry, working with PI's to look for funding etc... We realize that we would have to spend more time training certain people in order for the faculties do this extra job. Needless to say, we expect that there will still be exceptions that we will have to deal with. We would like to receive yours comments, experience of your institution on this issue. We are interested to know what is the tendency right now in your institutions i.e. centralizing vs decentralizing. You can respond to the list if you want to share the info with everybody or directly to me if you wish your information to be kept confidential. Thanks in advance Robert Masella Office of technology transfer Universite Laval Quebec, Canada tel:(418) 656-2692 fax:(418) 656-7785 E-mail: xxxxxx@bvar.ulaval.ca P.S. Going on holidays and hoping to read you all again in august!