At the heart of our three-year plan will be an effort to reduce duplication and improve efficiency, including through recent and ongoing reviews of units and functions.
To help us with these campus-wide functional reviews, we have partnered with Nous Group, an international consultancy firm that has worked with top institutions around the world and in Canada. Nous’ experience, knowledge and expertise will help us develop evidence-based recommendations to make changes benchmarked against other similar institutions.
University of Waterloo and Nous Group
The first functional reviews the University is working on with Nous are focused on communications and marketing, IT and finance. As these reviews are completed in the coming weeks, we will start similar reviews of other administrative areas.
Conceptual Approach
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Explore improvement and efficiency opportunities through several levers.
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Assesses the functions alignment with vision and strategy, service delivery, processes, technology, capability and capacity, organizational structures and culture.
Methodology
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Maps the current state and identify opportunities for improved effectiveness and efficiency through data analysis and stakeholder engagement.
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Stage 1: Initial Planning and Research (December 2024)
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Stage 2: Discovery and Exploration (January – February 2025)
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Stage 3: Recommendations and Final Report (February – March 2025)
Functional Scope
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Considers opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency.
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Examines all roles including those on the central team, those in other central areas and those within Faculties and Schools.
Stakeholder Engagement
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Gathers meaningful insights from over 50 leaders and users across all ASUs and Faculties within the university.
Project Deliverables
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Services – Consulting services to conduct a functional review of Finance, IT and Communications and Marketing to identify improvement opportunities.
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Objective – To provide a high-level future state design for each function that improves performance and allows them to operate more efficiently.
Project Outcome
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Waterloo has a high-level future state design for each function that is informed by its strategic needs, best practice and insights from comparator institutions.