Some Initial Thoughts Re

FACULTY OF MANAGEMENT, LIVING AGENDA WHITE PAPER

INTERNAL ORGANIZATION, GOVERNANCE

What follows are thoughts on organization and governance; in particular the Faculty's structure, decision-making processes, responsibility, accountability and openness.

STRUCTURE – ORGANIZATION GROUPINGS

We begin by discussing the principal organizational groupings which are Areas, Centers, Consortia, Education Programs and Administration.

Area groups. The Areas work well as presently constituted with the exception of Accounting, which is hampered by small size rather than structure. Our Areas relate well to the external professional structure of journals, professional associations, and Ph.D. programs built around business disciplines. Thus the Areas are effective for hiring, retention, mentorship and other Faculty development activities as well as for developing and managing courses, majors, minors, and concentrations in our degree programs.

We recommend the Area groups continue as the principal organization units for the Faculty. We suggest that the role of the Areas be enhanced through greater responsibility, specifically:

Budget allocation for recruiting, teaching and development activities
Slot allocation at the beginning of the fiscal year to permit more effective course planning and use of recruiting resources
Revenue responsibility (numbers of students in sections) on a fair and reasonable basis

Centers. Centers are important for facilitating research and some teaching activities. While Center membership broadly reflects Area membership, there are and should be no formal restrictions in this regard. Primary activities include funding of, conference presentations, speakers, workshops and research assistants. Centers are governed by detailed guidelines set by the University.

Consortia. Consortia are important for multidisciplinary, cross-Area activities. The most active consortium to date, the Innovation Consortium, has been successful in establishing links with the business community and holding regular research roundtables.

Centers and Consortia are the subject of a separate white paper, and are thus not elaborated on further here.

Education Programs -Degrees. It makes sense group the degree programs together in one organizational unit as they have numerous common and interdependent features requiring co-ordination. We suggest that MBA Japan, MBA 3 and CA programs be included in this grouping. There is also a very important student service component of these responsibilities where common skills are required.

Education Programs -Management Development.To progress towards the Faculty vision of "life long learning" requires significant growth in our offerings of programs for practicing managers and other professionals. The resources to accomplish this growth should be grouped together and include the International Executive Institute, the IMPM-type programs, and new programs of this kind (for example EMBA) as they are developed. The current initiatives with corporations should also be part of this organization unit. We suggest that CIMS should be included here until the Faculty's international activities grow to a size warranting its own infrastructure.

Administration. Administration is defined as the support services necessary for the effective management of the Faculty's resources. The major services are human resources, physical facilities, technology, budgeting and control, and interface with the University for finance and back office support. The very important development and fundraising support should be a separate unit in direct support of the Dean.

Organization Plan

There should be an organization structure and plan designed to facilitate the progress of the Faculty in an agreed upon direction and a related management system to make the organization viable and effective. There should be logical groupings of activities with delineated responsibility, authority, and accountability. The important groups in this organization plan have been described above. The relationship of these groups for planning, decision-making, co-ordination and information flows requires careful analysis which has not been done. We offer these thoughts as input into this analysis:

Greater co-ordination across Areas, Consortia, and Degree programs would foster a stronger and more unified academic climate, provide for better mentoring of tenure track faculty, and allow decisions to be made more quickly and coherently. We recommend that a tenured faculty member, such as an Associate Dean Academic, lead an effort in this direction.

Administrative services to students and faculty necessitate full time, accountable leadership. For students, this should mean a service-oriented, “one-stop-shop” for all needs outside of the classroom. For faculty, there should be a grouping of all important activities that support the core activities of teaching and research, as well as provide administrative policy and support to non-academic members of the Faculty.

There is logic in grouping together all programs targeted to practicing managers, whether on-site, in companies, or international. With respect to this latter category, there is discussion as part of the living agenda activity to expand out international efforts and if this were to happen there may be justification in having a separate international organization.

DECISION MAKING PROCESSES

We suggest discussion and clarification as to whether decisions should be made by individuals or groups of individuals and the implications for delegation of authority and accountability. We favor a model where, to the greatest extent possible consistent with academic traditions, decisions are made by individuals and groups of individuals who 1) have most knowledge regarding the issue, and 2) are most closely affected by the outcomes of the decision. Further, decisions should be clearly matched with decision makers, so as to ensure subsequent accountability.

Resource allocation decisions

Once an organization plan has been agreed there should be a well defined, understood and visible process for resource allocation decisions with the following elements:

Preparation, approval and communication of annual operating and capital budgets based on a Faculty annual plan.
Decentralization of authority to present budgets and subsequently spend against approved budgets with the related accountability for spending decisions made.
Processes for decision making within the context of the budget on faculty recruiting, retention and development and curriculum and program renewal and change.
Processes for decision making on initiatives requiring significant (to be defined) faculty resources.
An information system and flow which supports the decision making, the subsequent monitoring of results and communication to the faculty as a whole.
Continue to pursue the development of a clear work load policy, including provisions to encourage and enable teaching and course development across Area boundaries.

Committees and Task Forces. Committees and task forces within the organization structure are necessary or useful to co-ordinate activities, facilitate information flows, seek advice on important matters and in well defined cases to make decisions. There are 15 Faculty committees and approximately 22 other committees or task force groupings (reference Faculty Council meeting in September 2002).

We support the continued use of these committees (although the exact number may change with some of the changes recommended herein) and suggest their usefulness would be enhanced if, as has already been decided:

Each committee and task force has well defined mandates with scope, responsibilities, authorities and composition set out.
These mandates are reviewed on a regular basis and confirmed by the Faculty. Important input to this process is an annual report from each committee and task force.

Because of their importance, we have these comments about the Faculty Council and the Academic Committee

Faculty Council

Improvements need to be made here. Most tenure and tenure track faculty members see meetings of this Council as information sessions, not a decision making body, and as a result attendance is sporadic. Purely “informational” content can be provided by other means than having everyone sit through information sharing presentations.

As with all the Committees a mandate should be agreed, taking into consideration the University requirements, and the subjects to be referred to the Council and the responsibility and composition of the Council should be set out clearly.

Academic Committee.

This committee is considered to be a key decision making body for the Faculty. Yet, its activities are conducted in relative secrecy in that there is no formal communication of the decisions made and not made. If we are serious about increasing transparency, the minutes of these meetings should be made available to all full-time faculty. This can be accomplished easily on the faculty intranet (password protected), a decision which seemed to be made some time ago but not implemented.

As with the other committees, a mandate for the Academic committee should be agreed.

Respectfully submitted

Robert David

Don Wells

May21,2003