Staff Learning and Development

Leadership Development Program 2003
Policy Access: Campus Needs and Best Practices Project

Appendix A: Scope Document

Sponsors: Vice Chancellor James Hyatt,
Assistant Vice Chancellor, Finance and Controller Greg Brown

Project Facilitation:

Background
Policy is the glue that holds a decentralized organization together. Unfortunately, the general opinion across the campus is that UC Berkeley's policies are very difficult to find, and not easily understood if found. The Controller's Office hears concern about the difficulty of finding policy and related procedures from almost every group with which it meets, including the Chancellor's Cabinet.

Currently, UC Berkeley policies are developed by functional owners and promulgated (i.e., formally announced and made available) in an unorganized fashion, mostly via Deans and Director's memos, but not necessarily. There is no formal mechanism for policy development, approval, and communication. There is no formal style established to visually notify the reader that a particular document is actually a policy statement. Procedures and guidelines on how to implement a policy may or may not be available. The policy, procedures and/or guidelines may or may not reach the staff that needs to comply with the new policy. The Campuswide Policy and Procedures Web Site may or may not be updated when a new policy is approved, a policy link's URL changes, or related procedures and guidelines change. A user-friendly search engine for locating policies and procedures does not exist. Summaries of policies from the Office of the President, written in plain English, succinctly highlighting the main points and leading the reader to more detail, if needed, do not exist. Training on new policies and procedures may or may not be developed or effectively delivered. Policies and procedures once promulgated may not be revised for decades.

The Controller and the Controls Initiative Advisory Committee are charged with implementing the Regents' Controls Initiative at UC Berkeley. Internal control is any process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of objectives in the following categories: (1) effectiveness and efficiency of operations; (2) reliability of financial reporting; and (3) compliance with applicable laws and regulations. The Controls Initiative for the Berkeley campus has four goals:

1. determine the significant operational and controls risks to UC-Berkeley achieving its objectives;
2. implement appropriate process improvements and best practices to ensure the significant risks are held to an acceptable level;
   
3. establish and maintain a campus communications structure/support network to improve the control environment;
   
4. reduce risk by providing management tools and core competency training to improve operational effectiveness through cost-efficient controls.

Improving access to policies would yield enormous benefits across the campus, reducing the risk of outside audits, and allowing departments to focus on meeting their objectives with reduced resources, rather than spinning their wheels looking for a policy or correcting inevitable errors due to policy noncompliance. This LDP project will be an integral part of this process.

Project Scope
The LDP project is designed to engage the campus community in the process of improving access to policies and procedures, ensuring that the needs of the community are truly met. The project will consist of the following:

A. Research and Analysis

The LDP team will

1. Create a list of who issues UC Berkeley policy and how they disseminate new policy to the campus.
   
2. Analyze how other universities deliver access to policies, looking for best practices.
   
3. Design and perform a needs survey across campus asking
   1. How do employees (staff and faculty) currently find policy?
      
   2. How would staff like to find policy? What would be of most help?
      
   3. How could the communication of new policies be improved?

B. Recommendations (based on research and analysis)

The LDP team will

1. Develop recommendations on improving access to policy at UC Berkeley.
   
2. Develop metrics on how to measure the success of policy access improvements.

C. Report

The LDP team will

1. Prepare a report documenting the methods used by the group, the findings on the above research, and listing recommendations for improving access to policies for the Berkeley campus.
   
2. Share the report with the sponsors and the Controls Initiative Advisory Committee.
   
3. Make a presentation to the entire LDP program, including sponsors and guests.

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