The UCSF Faculty Association delivered a letter to Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellmann containing the results of the UCSF FA survey of faculty about the Operational Excellence pre-award plans. The letter below with the detailed survey results is available as a PDF.
May 20, 2011
Sue Desmond-Hellmann, MD MPH
Chancellor
University of California, San Francisco
Dear Sue,
The UCSF Faculty Association was contacted by several faculty who were concerned that the Operational Excellence Pre-Award plan was being pushed through without serious consideration of faculty concerns that the plan would make it more difficult for faculty to do their jobs.
To assess whether such views were widely held, the Faculty Association conducted an internet survey of the UCSF faculty from May 8-18. The detailed results are attached. We particularly call your attention to the text comments, which have been organized into categories to facilitate considering them.
Two hundred eighty of UCSF’s faculty responded (12%), including 18% of ladder/FTE faculty, 16% of in residence, and 10% of adjunct, the groups most likely to be affected by the proposed changes. The response was highest among full and associate professors, probably reflecting the fact that the list of faculty available to the Faculty Association is several years old. We attempted to compensate for this fact by encouraging faculty to have colleagues who did not receive our email invitations contact us to receive the survey. We only permitted one response per UCSF email address.
The survey itself was initially drafted by the Faculty Association Board, then circulated to several UCSF faculty with expertise in survey design for review for substance and tone. All changes that these reviewers suggested were incorporated. We took care, for example, to vary the order of response options (some supportive to unsupportive and some unsupportive to supportive) to avoid biasing responses. Professor Stanton Glantz, who teaches statistics, oversaw the project.
The results show that the faculty recognizes that there is room for improvement in pre-award management. When offered a non-exclusive list of options for “most likely to reduce costs of managing pre-award administration while at the same time maximizing support for your ability to compete successfully for grants,” only 13% selected “maintain the current system.”
At the same time, only 4% selected “implement the current OE centralized plan.”
The survey exposed a serious lack of confidence in the current plan and process:
* Faculty overwhelmingly believe that the changes will make their jobs harder. In response to the question, “What effect do you think this new system will have on the ease with which you can submit grants?” 62% believed it would make their job somewhat or much harder compared to 10% who though it would make their job somewhat or much easier.
* Seventy percent of faculty believed it would make them personally less productive compared to 8% who thought it would make them more productive.
* Sixty-nine percent thought it would reduce departmental productivity and morale compared to 8% who thought it would improve morale and productivity.
* Forty-four percent of respondents believed that campus leadership has been not very open or closed to faculty ideas and concerns about how to improve pre-award management, compared to only 19% who believed leadership had been somewhat or open to faculty ideas and concerns. There were similar numbers for openness to staff ideas and concerns.
* Forty-nine percent of respondents said that the process of developing the new pre-award system has somewhat or substantially decreased confidence in campus leadership compared to 14% who said it somewhat or substantially increased confidence in campus leadership.
There is serious concern about the decision to select iMedRIS software to manage the new system. Fifty-one percent of faculty respondents reported that iMedRIS required somewhat or much more time for them to prepare Committee on Human Research applications, compared to 29% who said somewhat or much less time. When asked, “Based on your experience with the CHR system, would you recommend that the campus purchase software to manage pre-award grants management from iMedRiS?” 51% said “no” compared to 14% who said “yes.”
As noted above, faculty do believe that improvement in current processes and procedures is possible and do support positive change. Of the nonexclusive choices offered moving forward, the most selected one was “Maintain a department/ORU-centered delivery of services with increased training so that signature authority can be delegated to departments, reducing the role of central contracts and grants to training and oversight, thereby reducing costs at that level,” which was selected by 46% of respondents, followed by “implement the current OE centralized plan in a few departments and ORU for a reasonable time, then compare its actual performance with existing high performing units in terms of faculty satisfaction and costs before deciding whether and how to proceed,” with 42% (The next highest choice had 29%.) These selections far exceed both maintaining the status quo (13%) and implementing the current plan (4%).
In the comments, one respondent succinctly summed up concerns that appeared in many of the comments:
Unlike the other elements of Operational Excellence, this pre-award function is about REVENUE, not cost management if anything, pre-award should be DE CENTRALIZED so that we can all be more responsive to the unique issues around RFPs. I have a personal relationship with my pre-award analyst who often works flexibly with my needs. I do not have any such relationship with anyone who provides a shared/centralized service. I’m all for centralizing cost and other administrative centers, not revenue.
The Faculty Association agrees with this point and supports the recommended path of seeking to strengthen the current distributed system and reduce costs by delegating authority to departments and ORUs with appropriate training and oversight. A concurrent voluntary test of the currently planned arrangement would also be acceptable, although running two parallel systems would probably be more expensive. We also support ongoing monitoring of how well a modernized decentralized system works so that appropriate adjustments, including moving toward or to the proposed centralized system should the modernized decentralized system fail to meet expectations.
We would be happy to meet and discuss these results with you or anyone else who is interested to move this issue forward, In these challenging times, it is important that we make the best possible decisions for UCSF, its faculty, students and staff.
Thank you for your consideration.
Warren M. Gold, MD
Chairman UCSF Faculty Association
Professor of Medicine
cc: EVCP Jeff Bluestone
VC Keith Yarnarnoto
Dean Sam Hawgood
Dean Mary Anne KodaKimbie
Dean John Featherstone
Dean David Viahov
Senate Chair Elena Fuentes-Afflick
Senate Vice Chair Robert Netorner
The full survey results are available as a PDF.
The letter below with the detailed survey results is available...with the link