What is the aim of the working group?
The aim of the working group is to clarify the mandates, roles and responsibilities of a number of functions and VU-wide consultations within VU Amsterdam, in order to achieve faster decision-making in less meeting time, while maintaining quality.
To achieve this, we are looking at:
- how we can place powers lower in the organisation,
- how to ensure better compliance with policy processes and procedures (who has which role: advise, determine, implement, evaluate?) and what the role of the VU-wide consultations and officers is in this, and how to enable employees to perform this role,
- how we can reduce meeting pressure created by the large number of steering groups and working groups and finally,
- how to thin out the mishmash of rules and regulations and get the overlap out (and make sure they are easy to find on the VU website).
What is the state of play now?
Assign powers lower
We are looking into the possibility of assigning powers lower within faculties, e.g. from faculty board member to department head, so that faculty administrators are less heavily burdened.
Faster and better advisory process
There are four VU-wide advisory bodies that advise the Executive Board. These are: Consultative Body for Portfolio Holders for Teaching(OPO), Impact Board (IBVU), Operational Management Meeting(VB) and the VU Consultative Meeting for Research (VUCMR). We asked the members of these advisory bodies where they think the meeting pressure comes from. The answers vary from one consultation to another and so do the action points for improvement. Generally speaking, the agendas of these consultations could be better coordinated so that topics end up on the right table and the process can also be accelerated. With unfortunate timing, it can now take up to 10 weeks before an advice from the advisory bodies ends up on the Executive Board's agenda. In addition, there appears to be a lot of confusion about who is responsible for what, which also creates a lot of noise. If it is not clear who is responsible for implementing a decision, there is a high risk that implementation will get stuck somewhere.
The working group recommends aligning these consultations more with each other and with the discussions in the units (faculties and departments), so that the advice process does not have to take 7/10 weeks, but is shortened to 4 weeks.
Reduce meeting pressure
There appear to be very many projects with associated steering committees. In our final report, we advise the Executive Board to critically examine each time a steering committee is set up whether a steering committee is really necessary and, if so, what composition it should have. Our aim is to set up fewer steering committees and, where possible, take on projects in the line organisation. We also recommend instructing new steering committee members better, so that their role becomes clearer and they can steer better and more efficiently.
Governance arrangements
There do appear to be six arrangements describing the governance of VU Amsterdam, which are scattered on the VU website. We analysed these regulations. There appears to be a lot of overlap in the documents and, moreover, the regulations do not appear to be known or easily found by everyone. We will make a plan of action for adaptation and findability.
