Dick Doolin, Senior Director, Tufts Support Services
As TSS Senior Director, Dick Doolin has spent much of the past year overseeing the launch of the new Tufts Support Services center, refining systems and meeting with groups on all three campuses to gather feedback on his organization. Before stepping up to lead TSS, Dick had a long track record at Tufts. His management of Financial Services included oversight of disbursements, financial systems, post-award research administration and oversight of Bursar operations.
What were your most important goals when you went live in December 2014?
When the doors first opened, our goal was to set ourselves up to handle transactional needs related to HR and finance activities. The Human Resources and Finance divisions remained in place but now we were going to be working with and complementing them.
We introduced Salesforce (software) and case management in the first month. This new concept of case management to handle HR and finance inquiries and requests, no matter what channel the community used to send them, was a big change. The challenge in the first month or two was meeting expectations while we were going through so many changes just getting everything set up.
What has surprised you most?
There have been a lot of comments that we close cases too quickly. That surprised me. We thought we had a good solution — anytime an accounts payable case goes into our AP system, it is no longer in Salesforce so that system closes the case. The community has given us a great deal of feedback on this subject so we are working on a new solution.
I’ve also been surprised by the wide range of questions people come to us with. We knew going in that our staff had to learn a significant amount of information but people call us for all kinds of different things, not just what we first described in our list of services. This has resulted in training being a lot more extensive than I’d expected. Everyday we’re expanding our understanding of how the university operates, which in turn, helps us improve our services.
What are you working on now?
We are currently working on the Administrative Process Integration (API) project, taking a hard look at the PAF process and what could be done to, at a minimum improve it, or if possible, eliminate it. In addition, we want to look at how we can reduce the number of steps required to make a labor distribution change. We’re also upgrading the Apptricity system the community uses for travel and expense reporting with a much more friendly user interface. Apptricity should be rolling out in March or April.
Does community feedback affect what you do?
We really pay a lot attention to feedback. We have an advisory committee and we look at survey responses all the time. We also reach out every month to politely ask people who contacted TSS and didn’t fill out a survey if they would talk to us about their experience. We’re looking for trends in what people like or don’t like, and whether responses are consistent.
We would like to see more people respond. It would help validate what we are hearing.
You talk a lot about service level agreements (SLAs). What are they and why are they important to what you do?
The SLAs are basically agreements between TSS and the Tufts community about how we will meet their expectations and needs. For instance, we established a baseline of an acceptable time frame for how long it takes to open and close a case from beginning to end.
We monitor SLAs regularly and report our performance to the TEAM Steering Committee, our Advisory Committee and, on occasion, to senior leadership. Also, whenever we make a presentation to the community, we include our SLA performance. In a vast majority of cases, we have met or exceeded our SLA goals, which is great, but we keep a close eye on the cases that are not satisfactory so we can address issues before they go astray.
What are you most proud of?
This (the launch of TSS) was such a significant undertaking; I’m proud and surprised that we were able to do this. Here we are, a year in, and our involvement in the community continues to expand, we have more community members using us and our case volume continues to rise. The staff here has worked very hard. To a person, every one of us has grown since we’ve been here.