“We view shortcomings in the spirit of mutual understanding”

Mr Wüest, you spent many years as Head of Academic Services before giving up the post last year to take over leadership of Workstream 5, which is focused on optimising the central units at ETH. What prompted the switch?
I had already decided to step down from my role as Head of Academic Services beforehand. At the time I didn't yet know what the future would look like, and I was open to doing something different. When the opportunity to join rETHink and contribute to the development of our central functions arose, I thought that this was something where my experience could be valuable.

Why was Workstream 5 launched?
Essentially, we want to put our heads together and figure out where and how ETH’s central and cross-unit support functions can be optimised so that they can continue giving our professorships and departments the highest levels of support, while at the same time meeting the needs of the university as a whole. Another goal of ours is to advance the digitalisation of the central units.

Wouldn't the central units have taken care of this anyway? Why was it necessary to create a standalone rETHink workstream?
If you want to evolve, every now and then you need to stop and do some fundamental reflection on what you're doing. On a day-to-day basis, people don't have the time to adopt this critical stance and put their own work under the microscope. That's the role of rETHink. We start with the question of what roles each level of the institution – professorships, academic departments, central functions – should be playing, and from there we identify the different ways of working together. One challenge for Workstream 5 is that we are dealing with very different services and processes. Real estate, IT and teacher support, to name just a few examples, work in very different ways. Each unit does its best in its own way, but there's a lack of holistic perspective. This means that there's also a lack of consistent principles, which leads to cross-unit processes often not being thought of as a whole. Our workstream is fleshing out fundamental principles that can be applied across different units. This creates a foundation for the further development of every central unit and the processes that they use.

What in particular has your workstream worked on over the past several months?
The core team has approached the issue with a very broad blueprint, which primarily involved holding discussions with the central functions and the academic departments. Based on the resulting analysis, we launched a working group in June whose job is to develop a shared understanding of how central units work together with the different levels of our institution. The idea is to develop fundamental principles for collaboration and clarify how certain support tasks are allocated across the various parts of the university.

Alongside this holistic approach, we identified two strategic focal points from the beginning and established two working groups to tackle them. One of the groups is working on how professorial planning is implemented, which includes the entire professorship cycle from the planning phase to the actual appointment and from the active phase until retirement, along with all the required resources that are connected with this process. The other group is focusing on digitalising the administration at ETH. Following an initial analysis phase, the group started working on a digitalisation strategy that will serve as the foundation for further development steps. These steps will be incorporated into a roadmap where they'll be fleshed out and ranked by priority. Both the core team and the working groups consist of representatives from the academic departments, professorships and central functions – a diverse group that reflects all the different possible perspectives.

What insights have you had so far?
First, the most important thing is that our support processes generally work very well, with all divisions doing a great job. We've also determined that responsibilities for support processes are generally assigned at the right places. However, the question remains as to which areas are suitable for centralised solutions and which areas are better left to the academic departments in terms of tasks and decision-making. We've also seen that central support functions are operating at their limit, thanks in part to the growth of ETH and to our culture of making things happen. Additionally, we view shortcomings in the spirit of mutual understanding. Service providers don't always know the needs and situation of their internal customers well enough. On the other side, customers don't always understand the perspective of the service units and why they act the way they do. On this point we need to improve transparency and communication between the central functions, departments and professorships. We also need to create structures that foster the continuous improvement of support processes by collecting feedback and learning from mistakes.

You mentioned that implementing professorial planning was one of the strategic focal points. What has this working group achieved so far?
Every department, along with numerous central units from different Executive Board domains, takes part in the professorial planning process. This process also acts as a sort of backbone for allocating resources, which is why we decided to make it a priority. The group is using an analysis of the status quo to draft a number of proposals for making the process better, more transparent and more effective. This means that the results will be primarily focused on the operational level. One important topic is how to improve transparent information sharing between all the units involved in the process so that teams and individuals can access the information they need and make the best possible contribution.

The questions coming from the digitalisation working group are more strategic in nature, however...
Yes, that's true. Right now the group is working on a holistic digitalisation strategy for the entire administrative side of ETH, which we'll present to the Executive Board at the end of November. The strategy is intended to provide a framework for all digitalisation plans. It'll contain, for instance, proposals for expanding the systematic use of big data sets to facilitate fact-based decision making, and how we should address the growing importance of new technologies when it comes to aiding our processes. The strategy will also define guidelines for future digitalisation projects. Once it's finalised, we'll work on a roadmap to define what the next steps are.

Looking ahead now: how will members of the ETH community feel the impact of Workstream 5 in the future?
I hope that everyone will become more aware of support processes and all the dependencies involved on each side. ETH members should also become more acquainted with what services are available, what kind of services they can expect from their counterparts in the central functions, and how they can influence the end product.

When would you personally consider rETHink to be a success?
It'll be a success once we succeed in translating our insights into real-world practice that make support processes more transparent for everyone, once we establish better communication between service providers and customers, and ultimately once we can improve the quality and effectiveness of the services on offer.