With Operational Excellence (OE) in full swing at Imperial, process and operations specialist Craig Walker discusses how OE can benefit the College.

Operational Excellence (OE), formally launched in April 2014, is a College-wide programme which seeks to deliver excellent, more efficient and effective administrative services to support better the College’s mission and meet the needs of staff and students. OE provides training, methods, tools, and techniques to help staff analyse current practices, identify areas for improvement, and implement change. 

Craig, from consultancy firm OEE Ltd., has been working with Imperial since the launch of OE to guide, coach and support staff as they get to grips with OE techniques.

What is your role at the College?

I work for external consultants OEE ltd, and at Imperial support a small College team who coordinate all OE activity. We have worked closely with the College leadership and Head of Learning & Development  to take tools, methods and training already applied successfully in the sector and adjust them to the specific needs and culture of the College. This means reducing jargon, and providing worked examples of the techniques in practice at Imperial. The aim is that the College becomes increasingly autonomous in implementing OE techniques, and we're here to help facilitate and guide during these early stages.

What does “excellence” mean to you?

Imperial is a world-class organisation and deserves world-class administration to underpin its academic mission. We shouldn't settle for mediocrity in anything that we do – whether that be the process for recruiting a new member of staff, getting a projector fixed, or helping an academic track down a journal in the library. All of our administrative processes should be the very best they can be – effective, efficient, and tailored to the needs of the College and its community.

All staff should be able to identify practices that are wasting their time and resources, as well of those of colleagues and students. They should understand the root causes of problems and find long-term solutions, take pride in the work that they do, and be recognised for their efforts and achievements.

What kinds of challenges is OE hoping to address?

In large and complex organisations such as Imperial, it is common to find administrative work being duplicated by many different departments. For example we often end up with too many spreadsheets – each produced by different departments but all holding very similar information. A better and more efficient flow of information between different departments and teams would enable them to share this information and free up time and resources for everyone. OE aims to tackle this by establishing processes that make information and decisions flow more effectively and more collaboratively across the College.

A key example would be our admissions process. For student applications to be processed they are passed through Registry – to ensure they meet certain compliance requirements such as immigration – before reaching the relevant academic department. We know that there can be inconsistency in how this process works for each applicant.  Ideally an applicant would immediately get a personal acknowledgement that their application is in order and an explanation of the next steps. We know that our current processes can fall short of this ideal. Improving the flow of information between the centre and Departments, ensuring better visibility of applicant progress, would allow us to provide more consistent, timely and helpful information to applicants. Within the constraints of the current system there are examples of excellence and if we can take the best parts of existing practices and apply the College wide, the applicant experience could be transformed.

How would you sum up your experience working at Imperial so far?

For me personally, working at the College is a genuinely inspirational experience and I am consistently impressed by the intellect, integrity and good intentions of those I work with. Fundamentally the strength of the College is its diversity and it is a delight to work here.