Organisation
Reintroduction of position of General Director, Administration and Central Services
In February, the University Council advised the Executive Board to again fill the ‘vacant’ position of General Director, Administration and Central Services (BB). This is in response to the organisational development programme and is based on the premise that this will alleviate the coordination task of the Executive Board and give the Employee Council a logical point of contact. The Executive Board has decided to adopt this advice.
Better connections
The appointment of a General Director (AD) also addresses the need to strengthen the horizontal coordination between the directorates of Administration and Central Services (BB) and between the BB and the faculties and Expertise Centres. This will strengthen our strategic impact. We also want to have our decision-making processes run more smoothly and routinely, foster closer connections with the faculties, centres of expertise and representative bodies, ensure stronger coordination of university-wide policies and optimise cross-university services and operational management processes. Our aim is also to enhance the agility and effectiveness of cross-faculty and cross-directorate improvement programmes, such as educational logistics and digitisation. The General Director will play a key role in these areas.
What will be the role of the General Director?
The General Director will be chair of the Administration and Central Services Management Team, and will be hierarchically responsible for the directors of the BB. The Executive Board members will continue to be their line managers in line with their respective portfolios. The General Director will be Secretary of Strategy to the Executive Board, and will be responsible for further strengthening our management support, policy cycle and operational management. This means better alignment between policy and implementation and greater cohesion among directorates. This also reflects our desire to evaluate the effectiveness and structure of internal consultations within the BB, and those of the BB with faculties and centres of expertise. The director of Strategic and Academic Affairs (SAZ) will be vice-chair of the BB Management Team, given the central role of SAZ in the policy cycle of education, research and impact.
The General Director will also be responsible for monitoring and implementing the outcomes of the organisation development programme and the contingent improvement programmes and projects. The incumbent will also be tasked with ensuring that the expertise needed to guide changes is structurally in place within the organisation. In-house staff know their own organisation well, and we expect that this will make the implementation of our change programmes more effective. The organisational change programme will be asked to put forward a relevant proposal in consultation with experts from within the university.
The role of the directors of General and Administrative Services, expertise centres and portfolio holders of Operational Management within the faculties
Each director will continue to have full responsibility for their own directorate. Nonetheless, we will explicitly set out the shared responsibility of all directors in the operational management domain for the university as a whole. This will be drawn up under the guidance of the organisational development programme and formalised once approved.
A number of programmes will start earlier
Some developments cannot wait for the arrival of the General Director and will start under the supervision of particular directors. These include, for example, the improvement of the policy cycle and the alignment of policy and implementation in the area of education and research (director SAZ), the further development of LURIS in the context of the growing importance of the valorisation task (director LURIS) and the formulation of a proposal to restructure the I-pillar (director ISSC): the ISSC and Information Management, including the function of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). We are also asking the director of the Staff Office, together with the relevant teams, to take on the improvement programmes within the organisational development programme that relate to management support. This may include, for example, a clearer annual cycle and policy timetable for the University Council, and the provision of explicit information about and communication regarding decisions and regulations (the Policy Repository project).
Next steps
The recruitment of the General Director will start shortly. Our aim is to have the new director in post before the end of this year. The organisational development programme will then be wound down and embedded in the existing organisation.