TC3 is a Model of What Can Work

A recent interview with Carl Haynes,TC3 President
by Jim Crawford.

As Tompkins County enters a period of tough economic choices and difficult budgets, it is very valuable to have a major county partner that has been through its own season of financial travail and is staying on top of its game.

Tompkins Cortland Community College, on the hill overlooking Dryden, is a large institution that depends on government funding and has had to cope with colliding trends at various times over the years. I spoke with its president, Carl Haynes, about leading the college’s sizable staff in the delivery of education services at a time of shrinking public funds and growing service demands.

President Haynes was also a member of the county’s 2009 Budget Community Advisory Panel (CAP) which presented its Final Report to the legislature on 9/1/09, so I asked him what TC3 has learned that may be of value in county government. He sees parallels between the college’s budget hurdles and those confronting the county today, noting “County departments face very similar challenges to the ones we face: state and federal mandates with strict regulations, limited staff resources, and a dynamic volume of service recipients that often grows in economically hard times.”

The single biggest lesson he cited was their experience conducting a “Lean Office” initiative to find streamlined processes to deliver services at lower costs. He believes it has “tremendous potential” for county government to find efficiencies “with less human resources—even in departments where demand is growing.”

Using concepts also known to industry as “Lean Manufacturing” to “wring efficiencies” out of dynamic organizational processes, he credits the “Lean Office” approach with having saved the college money already, and helping them deliver better services in the midst of a 14% student enrollment boom earlier this year—without using additional staff. He said, “I just met with our enrollment services staff and there was clear consensus that we could not have handled the increase in volume this year otherwise.”

He also believes the quality of service is improved and employees enjoy the “cross-functional collaboration as they really work together.” He believes the college is “just getting started” and he “looks forward to sharing Lean Office insights with many more departments at the college.”

President Haynes referred me to Blixy Taetzsch, TC3's Dean of Operations and Enrollment Management, for specific details about how the Lean Office initiative has played out. Dean Taetzsch told me "we've already begun to experience significant positive results" from the initiative that was begun earlier this year. She confirmed that "we have not only handled increased volume of applicants with the same staff resources, but we have offered better service to the students according to our own staff accounts."

Staff satisfaction with the Lean Office approach is a strong indication that it works, as staff might be expected to feel threatened by restructuring of work responsibilities, relationships and roles. But this approach to restructuring work flows begins by fully engaging the people who do the work and solicits their best ideas about how to work better. "The key is that the people doing the day-to-day work are coming up with the proposed changes" Taetzsch says, adding "we're working both 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' to find better ways to work together and lower our costs."

Preliminary planning for the Lean Office process was done in the fall semester of 2008 and the staff became engaged in the process around February of this year, just as the enrollment boom was hitting the college. Haynes said "we are just getting started" with the "low hanging fruit" and he looks forward to finding efficiencies and savings elsewhere at the college.

Bottom-up will eventually include finding out what the students think, as Taetzsch wants "to implement surveys of students as the ultimate customers" in the college setting. She said their experience with the Lean Office approach in one department encourages them to go further with plans to implement it in the Finance and Human Resources departments next. Those departments and their functions are close parallels to county departments, so the example TC3 gives to county cost-cutting is easy to imagine.

Haynes hopes the county will make a serious investment in the Lean Office strategy. He believes County Administrator Joe Mereane is supportive of the strategy and may even have worked with the same consultants in Onondaga County, but points out that legislators will have to insist it becomes a county priority in the new year and new legislative term. Since so few legislative candidates are even mentioning the CAP Report, one wonders whether it will gain that support on the legislature.

But under economic 'storm conditions' in the coming years, county leaders may be forced to do what is necessary and that may yet lead to the positive long-range results TC3 gives us good reasons to hope for.