As the academic year began, Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez identified simplification – making processes and decision-making on campus more agile – as one of their top three priorities. 

Levin charged former President Richard Saller, former Provost John Etchemendy, and Vice President for University Affairs Megan Pierson with leading the simplification initiative, whose goal, as he explained last fall, is to “reduce frictions and help make it easier to get things done.” The effort builds on work begun during Saller’s presidency when he asked Etchemendy to explore ways to enhance efficient use of resources and to cut down and ease hurdles that sometimes stand in the way of progress.

“Stanford works best when our faculty and students have the ability to get things done, and our outstanding staff are positioned to enable this,” Levin said. “Provost Martinez and I heard too many stories of bureaucratic friction, and we believed there could be no one better than Richard and John to lead a simplification initiative due to their deep experience and commitment to our academic mission.” 

In a Q&A with Stanford Report, Saller and Etchemendy discussed their efforts to make the experience of working at Stanford simpler. 

Why is this initiative important to the mission of the university? 

Saller: Stanford aims to be the best university in the world. Meeting that aspiration requires not only recruiting the best faculty, students, and staff, but also facilitating their work as efficiently as possible. We have found that an environment of risk aversion has led to a culture of hyper-caution that has impacted our research and education. For example, faculty appointment files have become unreasonably long, requiring inordinate hours of work to assemble and read, and data use agreements can take too long to process. 

In an effort to be comprehensive in our decision-making we have sometimes lost sight of the essential. This initiative is an effort to examine the university's processes to facilitate research, education, and clinical care by reducing decision towers to expedite services, striking an appropriate balance of considerations, in recognition of the fact that our most precious asset is time.

You’ve engaged with a lot of people around Stanford on this initiative. What are you hearing, and what signs of progress are you seeing? 

Etchemendy: Last year, in preparing the report for Richard, I gathered input from many faculty and staff around the university to find out what processes and policies were causing the most dissatisfaction. Then, starting in the fall, Richard, Megan Pierson, and I began meeting with deans and heads of administrative units to discuss how we can fix the processes people find most cumbersome and change some of the policies people find most frustrating. The main thing we’ve heard this year is a uniform recognition of the problem and a sincere desire to fix it. It helps that the president and provost have made this one of their highest priorities.

Mind you, a lot of the needed changes will take time to implement since we are looking at improvements that affect university-wide systems. But we’ve already gotten some quick wins on some processes that have been frustrating people. For example, reimbursements for meal expenditures above the recommended limits can now be authorized at the school level, rather than being delayed by a further requirement for central approval; we changed a policy that had prevented people attending an evening conference in Berkeley from being reimbursed for an overnight stay; and we no longer require that all travel be booked through Stanford Travel. These are a few of the easy changes that should make everyone’s lives easier. 

What are some particular areas that you’ve looked at first? 

Etchemendy: We’ve obviously been focused on many of the central processes that people find challenging. And we’ve gotten really great cooperation from Financial Management Services (FMS), who are in charge of procurement and reimbursements, the Office of Research Administration, which handles research contracting, and University Human Resources, which oversees many administrative policies and processes. 

But we are casting a very wide net since there are many other units, besides the central administrative units, that we are calling on to help with the simplification project. In fact, the provost asked every unit, academic and administrative, to describe their simplification efforts as part of their annual budget submissions. We are reviewing these plans to see how we can help and encourage the units to achieve real improvements, not just window dressing. 

In some cases, what is needed is an entire culture change, from a risk-averse attitude to an enabling, service-oriented mindset. 

Any successes yet? 

Saller: Yes. The good work of units has made measurable progress in simplification. Here are several examples. 

Financial Management Services has significantly reduced the average cycle-times for contracts from 30 to 20 days at the same time that volumes have increased by over 62% during the last two years. Based on Stanford’s clean audits, FMS has been allowed to raise the threshold for central review of federally funded purchase requisitions from $25,000 to $50,000, which has resulted in a 25% decrease in the number of purchase requisitions requiring central review and a 53% decrease in cycle-times. Even better, later this spring, the threshold for central review of non-federal requisitions will be increased from $50,000 to $250,000, which will result in a 72% reduction in purchase orders requiring central review. 

As another example, much of the research in the social sciences requires approval of the Institutional Review Board; through some changes of process last year, the median time to approval by the non-medical IRB has been cut by more than half, “resulting in reduced processing times and happier faculty,” as one senior faculty member told us. 

How will you monitor accountability and make sure changes are having the desired effect? 

Saller: We’ve asked administrative units to provide metrics, where applicable, in their submissions and then to monitor changes in the coming year in order to evaluate their efficacy. By measuring how well they’re working, we can make informed decisions about what to keep in place, adapt, expand, and consider implementing more broadly. We’ll also listen closely to the people involved in these processes, both as administrators and users, so that we can understand and address what they’re experiencing.

What’s next? 

Etchemendy: Well, we’ve only just begun. The university is a very large place, and there are many offices that can reduce the administrative friction that takes time away from our core missions of teaching, research, and clinical care. We will be continuing our work through this year and next, and hope that by the end, we will have made a noticeable difference in the efficiency of everything we do. 

I believe that Stanford is the strongest, most innovative research university in the world. If we can make ourselves the most efficient as well, just think how much more we can contribute to the world!