Budget/reVIEW

Last week, York Tech’s state allocation was reduced again by 4.04 percent ($278,410). Measures are in place to deal with this cut. The College had $500k budgeted for contingencies. We have a remaining balance of $221,590 left in the contingency account. We could absorb an additional cut of 3.3 percent from the remaining balance. With this 4.04 percent cut, our state allocation is $6,617,547. As a reminder, in 2007-2008 our state allocation was $8,576,868. That is an approximate $2 million loss in state budget allocation within the past two years. The state allocation represents 18 percent of our total budget with tuition and fees being the primary source of revenue.

How do we continue to pursue student success when faced with regular cuts in state funding? We must find more efficient and cost effective ways to do business that will ultimately improve net profitability. We do this by examining our processes and possibly changing how we do things or eliminating unnecessary steps. Hopefully as we do this, we not only cut costs, but we improve how we do our jobs.

One of the tools we will use to help us examine our work processes is reVIEW (Realizing Exceptional Value in Everyday Work). You may remember that I gave an overview of reVIEW at our beginning-of-the-year meeting. reVIEW will help us learn to analyze processes, identify steps we may need to change or eliminate, and to recognize waste (activities that cost us time or money but add no value). We will have a stronger grasp of root-cause analysis and methods to redesign processes that do not rely on “layering” fixes onto existing work. The layering approach eventually makes work time-consuming (in relation to the value added for the students) and frustrating for employees.

Thirty-two employees are participating this fall and another 32 will participate in the spring. In-house coaches and trainers will be developed over the next year and will assist in training others in the future. As employees go through training, their assignments will involve observing processes, so they may ask to observe you working on particular processes in your job. At this point, they are observing for the purpose of learning how to analyze a process. They are not observing to criticize or make judgments on what you do.

The wonderful part of the reVIEW process is that each of you will have the primary role in analyzing and identifying items or steps that need to change. No one knows your job better than you. The kind of self-examination we’re pursuing will help each of us look at our work with a new perspective and can be valuable motivation for creating change. I look forward to seeing how reVIEW will change, not only the way we do our jobs, but empower us to create a culture where each person is highly valued in an environment that promotes ideas, input, and problem-solving at all levels of the College.