Grad Path Lean Workout project helps students graduate on time

Grad Path Lean Workout project helps students graduate on time
Grad Path Lean Workout Team Meeting
Grad Path Lean Workout team members have spent more than a year working on new ways to streamline OU's transfer articulation and graduation certification processes.

For more than a year, a cross-functional team of staff and students has been working to streamline university processes and procedures with the goal of helping students graduate in a timely manner. 

 

This collaboration, known as the Grad Path Lean Workout, is sponsored by the Provost’s office and draws on expertise from staff members in the Registrar’s office, advising and academic departments, as well as OU students. The team is focusing its efforts on the student-critical processes of transfer articulation and graduation certification.

 

“Using Lean principles allows us to recognize where there is waste and redundancy in our processes or where we lose touch with students,” said Susan Awbrey, senior associate provost. “It is a wonderful example of collaborating across divisions and offices to create an environment of success for OU students. I am really proud of the work the Grad Path team has done.”

 

Transferring credits

 

Transfer articulation is the process of determining how course credits transfer between colleges and universities. At Oakland University, more than 5,500 transcripts are processed each year. This process provides information that helps transfer students gauge their progress toward a degree. In order to streamline the transfer articulation process, the team is working to enhance the level of transfer credit detail provided to newly admitted transfer students by:

 

  • Providing transfer credit evaluation information through the progress-to-degree information available in MySAIL
  • Initiating institution-to-institution transcript agreements to eliminate time consuming handling leading up to course evaluations
  • Standardizing articulation protocol to ensure consistent, accurate and timely transcript processing
  • Centralizing the evaluation staff to reduce query resolution time
  • Improving the transfer articulation library by annually loading course details, accelerating the course review process via automation

 

According to data from OU’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, transfer students make up more than 40 percent of the university’s student body.

 

Mark Doman, a Pawley Professor in Lean Studies in OU’s Department of Organizational Leadership, said the Grad Path team worked together to apply Lean Workout methodology toward solving university-wide challenges.

 

“The benefits to OU will be significant and the impact on transfer students’ enrollment and degree decisions could be a game changer,” Doman said. “Students will get a timely roadmap with clear sight lines to graduation. These changes will help students avoid many last-minute frustrations. It’s a great example of what a university-wide team can accomplish when it is focused on improving processes that are central to OU’s mission.”

 

Grad Path Lean Workout Team

The collaboration involves staff and students from departments across campus.

Certified to graduate

 

In addition, the team is implementing several measures to help students successfully navigate the graduation certification process. Before graduating, each student goes through a certification process, which verifies they have completed all the requirements to receive a degree.

 

The team members found in their initial analysis that 80 percent of students who applied for graduation had deficiencies and roughly one out of every six students was not able to graduate when they desired. To help students stay on track to graduate, the team proposed the following actions, which keep students and their advisers in the loop on academic progress:

 

  • Providing advisers with a list of students who have reached senior status
  • Establishing and implementing standards to document, train and measure the new undergraduate certification process, creating a baseline for continuous improvement
  • Having professional and faculty advisers proactively schedule consultations with senior students prior to their graduation application
  • Creating automatic front-end “poke-yokes” (checks) in the graduation application process immediately notifying students and advisers of deficiencies
  • Producing a daily graduation applicant report identifying students who completed the grad application process
  • Scheduling the first audit in advance of the graduation application process to allow time to correct deficiencies

  

As a result of implementing several Grad Path Lean Workout recommendations, the team estimates the following improvements for the fall 2015 term:

 

  • The Graduation Certification process was shortened by 40 percent, allowing students to receive their diplomas an average of three weeks earlier than the previous year.
  • Compared to the previous year, the number of students unable to graduate in the term of their choice dropped by 38 percent.

 

To learn more about applying for graduation, visit the website. The deadline to apply to graduate in spring 2016 is Friday, Jan. 29.