10/22/2014

It’s been several weeks since I met with you regarding the feedback from the HR Assessment, and I wanted to update you on the progress of some of our next steps.

Organizational Review
Clint Davidson, an independent consultant and retired human resource officer from Duke University, has been retained to conduct the organizational review. Linda Harig and I met with Clint and gave him a wealth of information on IPS and its agencies, including past customer satisfaction survey results, the Baldrige application, employee engagement survey results, staff lists and staff job descriptions, IPS and agency financials and much more.

Hopefully you have already seen an email from me with suggested comparison organizations. When finalized, we will present this list of comparison agencies and institutions to Clint. He will visit with each one and examine its best practices, which he will compare with the best practices of IPS. He also will be interviewing members of the leadership team and several employees from each entity. If you are one of the employees interviewed by Clint, feel free to share with your co-workers the types of questions he asked. He also plans to interview some of our customers and stakeholders.
We are hopeful that Clint will finalize his report and any recommendations by the end of the year. We hope to be able to share his findings with you shortly after that.

Audit
Linda Hendricks Harig and I met a few weeks ago with Sandy Jansen from internal audit. We have asked Sandy and her team to review a number of things related to budgets and finances of the organization. Included in the review will be a look at:

· financial foundation and grant/contracts activity over the last five years.

· central office funding model and best practices.

· sustainability projections for agency funding models.

· legislation that provides our funding and our compliance with the law.

· a cost/benefit analysis of field consultant use of UT cars vs. their personal cars.

Elections for UT System Employee Committees
Judie Martin is in the process of working with UT HR to set up the elections for IPS employees to be selected for the UT system committees. These appointments are in lieu of employees serving on the former IPS Employee Relations Committee. You should see announcements on these elections very soon.

Role of the IPS Central Office
At the leadership team retreat scheduled for early December, we will work on better defining the role of the central office and establishing a service orientation model for the office. If you have ideas on what you would like to see, please let me know or share your ideas with your Executive Director by the end of November.
In closing, several things are coming into place and work on many of the action items Linda and I shared with you in our needs assessment meetings are underway. I have enjoyed meeting most of you during the needs assessment follow-up sessions and will be making more visits over the next few months. It has also been great to begin meeting with our advisory and stakeholder groups. They are overflowing with appreciation and comments about the work you are doing with them and how much you are making a difference!

Thanks for all you do. I hope our paths will soon cross again.
Take care,
Herb