Front Door Project 2006-2007 Final Report
Cross Cutting Issues
Information Sharing
Policies and procedures are not always available either between departments or within a department.
Cross Train employees
We should cross-train front-line employees in student service-related departments across the college to be able to properly answer a wide range of student questions. This will eliminate the need for students to be sent to multiple departments (either in person, by phone, or by e-mail) to obtain answers to the relatively simple and usually repetitive questions. This will also result in the front-line employee more effectively listening to all the students’ questions to properly answer, resolve problems and/or forward the student to the correct department, and eliminate any “runaround.”
Create FAQs
We should collaboratively create a college-wide list of “FAQs” (Frequently Asked Questions) and their appropriate responses to be used by all departments and post them on the RVCC website for faculty, staff and students to access. It would also be helpful to create a college-wide Internal Glossary that can be referred to by all departments, so that faculty and staff could understand the often specialized terminology of other departments.
Systemic Thinking
The College encourages initiative and free thinking in its employees as a way of creating new ways to innovate and succeed in the face of shrinking resources. As a result, many different areas of the College have developed different ways of completing the same task. Also, not all departments are taking full advantage of the integrated systems on campus such as BANNER, the Lion’s Den and Microsoft Outlook. Innovation and development that happens behind the scenes is not seen by the College community as a whole, and as a result, there is duplication of ideas and work being done on many levels.
Develop procedures within all departments to use the integrated systems in order to decrease workload
For example, all student information pertaining to the Early Credits and Concurrent Enrollment programs need to be stored and processed within BANNER so that all departments needing access to this information can access this information as necessary. In addition, use of the Lion’s Den portal should be expanded to allow access for students in the recruitment process to encourage interaction with the College and to help make their transition easier.
Sustainability
Due to the lack of resources, many projects are implemented quickly and without thought to sustainability. In addition, these projects may not make full use of all resources due to lack of awareness of their availability.
Create sustainable projects
All projects undertaken at the behest of the Front Door Project Committee Report should do so with the idea of sustainability in mind. Communication should be enlisted at all levels of the College in order to determine ways that technology can be fully used in order to decrease the long term need for manpower. An example of this is the Campus Calendar. This calendar should be implemented using as much technology as possible to reduce the manpower required to monitor and publish the Calendar. The implementation of Content Management for the website is an example of implementing a more sustainable solution than the one currently in place which requires more manpower.