Business Operations Strategic Goals

A key strategy of Excellence for All is to strengthen our infrastructure – the behind-the-scenes business operations that support our teachers and students. Creating a stronger infrastructure will provide better service and transparency to students, families and the community.

To build a stronger infrastructure we will focus first on the following:

• Developing budget protocols and evaluation tools that ensure efficiency and efficacy
  
• Evaluating and redesigning our business processes to maximize effectiveness
  
• Adopting and adapting technologies that improve our efficiency and provide cost-savings

Budget Protocols
Creating a stronger budget process will help us ensure that our resources are used to meet our goals. To begin this work SPS has developed a year round budget process and timeline to help schools complete their budgeting successfully and on time. The new process clearly identifies the sequence, schedule, and tasks that must be completed at each step in the budget process to guarantee effective outcomes. Implementation of the new process is successfully underway. Additional refinements will be put into practice to further strengthen 2010-2011 budget planning that will begin in fall 2009.

Business Process Redesign
Documenting, evaluating, and streamlining our business processes will help us identify ways for our departments to work together better and will help us eliminate redundancies. Efforts are currently underway to assess process maturity, identify customer requirements, identify key performance measurements and monitoring methods, evaluate results and plan for continuous improvement in each of the service areas within our business operations.

Technologies
Our department of technology services provides several important services, including student assignment, student information, and academic systems data. Many of these services – including student assignment – operate on a 1970’s era VAX computer system, which must be replaced. Migration off of the VAX system to a new technology platform is currently in progress. The new platform is on track to be implemented in preparation for the adoption of our new student assignment plan which is expected to take effect in fall 2010.