Operational Excellence (OE) is well underway at Imperial, with more than 75 staff trained to use the method to improve the processes they work with.

OE is a College-wide programme that aims to establish more joined-up, systematic and efficient processes to support the College’s academic mission and better meet the needs of staff and students.

There are two projects currently running under the OE banner – the Student Information Management Programme – which examines the processes around how student information is managed across the student life cycle at Imperial, and the Staff Recruitment Project – which looks at the administrative procedures involved in staff recruitment activities.

David Parrott, Admissions Officer in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, shared his experience of OE training and how he is putting the skills to use.

What is your role at the College?

I’m the Admissions Officer for the Faculty of Natural Sciences - my team is responsible for the receipt and processing of all student applications to the Faculty. We check them to make sure they are valid and meet various compliance requirements before they are handed over for academic consideration – for example ensuring that students have the appropriate English language requirements or immigration status. After the academic decision about whether to admit an applicant has been made, we then process the offers to our prospective students.

How are you involved with Operational Excellence?

I sit on an admissions user group for the Student Information Management Programme, which at present is considering how to ensure that we provide the best service possible for prospective students and applicants. I have been involved with mapping and reviewing current admissions processes across the College - identifying best practice and areas for improvement and considering how these processes should look going forwards. These groups provide a valuable forum for debate and discussion, ensuring that the views of those involved in the processes being reviewed are heard.

What was the Operational Excellence training like?

It was an intense but very valuable three days. We began by learning the theory behind OE and models that underpin it. One such example involved a methodological approach to identifying those processes which add value and eliminating those aren’t needed or waste out time and resources. Like many of the methodologies behind OE, this approach began in industry or manufacturing, and it was interesting to see how they could be translated to complex organisations such as Imperial. With this in mind we then considered how we could apply OE to analyse and the processes and procedures that we work with.

How have you used this knowledge?

As well as allowing me contribute to the broader SIMP project, the perspective I gained from the OE training has allowed me to see my own team with a fresh pair of eyes, and has already helped me to spot ways we can improve in our day-to-day work. Principally this involves ensuring that we are working as effectively and efficiently as possible – by tackling duplication of work and ensuring consistency in our practice across the team.

What happens now?

We’ll be piloting some of the proposals to come from the SIMP admissions user group over the next few months, and I’ll be interested to see how these develop and affect wider change across the College. This doesn’t mean that the task is over though – we’ll be continuing to review the work that we do to make sure that we are providing the best possible service to our colleagues and prospective students.