Tianjin University Renai College Management Department,Tianjin,China Email:jhwangcheng@163.com

[Abstract]With the development of independent colleges,the number of students is increasing year by year,and the pressure of department-level educational administration management is increasing accordingly.There is an increasing demand for optimizing work flow,improving work efficiency and reducing labor intensity.Lean thinking is a system theory extracted from lean production,which is spread and applied in the field of production and service as an universal management idea.This paper takes the educational administration work of Tianjin University Renai College Management Department as an example,where lean thinking is adopted to design and optimize various activities in the workflow.It has been achieved good management results and valuable management experience.

[Keywords]Lean thinking;Independent College;Educational Administration;Process Optimization

Introduction

With the development of independent colleges,the number of students increases year by year.Taking Tianjin University Renai College Management Department as an example,the number of major has been increased from 3 to 5 from beginning till now.The number of students has been increased from 1,497 to 2,232 while the college was just founded in 2006 and there were four grades students in the second half year of 2009.The number of full-time teachers has been risen from 9 to 26 from 2009 till now while the number of educational administrators has been only increased from 1 to 2.The routine works of educational administrators in management department is about to arrange more than 300 major courses every academic year,to examine the qualifications of over 500 graduates,and to do early warning of the learning situation for more than 320 students.Meanwhile,the focus of the college’s work has been shifted down,a large number of routine works,such as teachers’workload accounting,students’examination arrangement and list entry,has been transferred to various departments.As a result,the work pressure of departmentallevel educational administration has been increased as well.The traditional working method is hard to complete the task on time so that the demand for optimization of working method and workflow is increasingly stronger.

The departmental-level educational administration work of our department is managed by both the college and the department.The principle of college academic affairs office focuses on the overall work for the whole college and fails to take into account the specific situation of each department，such as to arrange the schedule of each work in the whole semester mostly,to remind regularly as an assistant.All departments can only complete multifarious tasks on time mechanically.It is too busy to innovate and self-charging for each department.The main confront problem of educational administration in our department is that workload,information and idea is too much,and work is too complex.Other problem is that educational administration staff is very busy in the whole semester,that the management service cannot keep up with the needs of students and teachers.In order to solve these problems fundamentally,it is necessary to optimize the educational administration process.

Lean thinking originated from the lean production method of Toyota in Japan,whose core idea is to eliminate all forms of waste and create as much value as possible with less manpower,less equipment,less time and smaller site(Liu & Liu,2006,p.16,p.36).It is a kind of scientific and effective quality management thought which has been practiced by many enterprises domestic and overseas for a long time.The content of educational administration work covers a wide range,which is similar to dispatchers in factories.Therefore,we introduce the idea of lean production in the production enterprises to optimize and improve the work process.To identify and analyze the problems existing in the traditional educational administration business process,and to optimize and to improve the inefficient process,we combine the advanced management ideas of enterprises with the reality of educational administration management in colleges and universities by using modern management concepts and methods.Thus it is to achieve the goal of scientific management,efficient service and satisfactory for both teachers and students.

At present,most colleges and universities in China are short of systematic understanding and design of the reforms of current teaching management process.Most of them focus on the level of the school’s educational administration department,such as in the way of management system reform,how to improve professional settings and how to train the educational administration management personnel and strengthen the information construction and so on.The research on the departmental-level educational administration management is limited to increasing training opportunities,improving the quality of personnel,and bringing staff initiative and so on.While there is a lack of research on specific work methods and processes(Xie,2014,pp.7-8;Liu,2012,pp.98-99;Dong,2010,pp.129-131,p.141).The actual effect is not very ideal while the reason is that the teaching management department still stays in the traditional functional management mode.Although each department defines the post responsibilities,the lack of coordination and communication within the Department leads to in the work connection not being close,human factors seriously interfere,the whole business process being oriented to the internal needs of the management department,rather than focusing on the needs and satisfaction of teachers and students as first(Zhu,2009,p.1).

Measures taken in some colleges and universities are the business process reengineering and to establish a new set of policies and procedures.For example,Tsinghua University has built two service function centers based on the comprehensive educational administration information system.“Registry center”mainly undertake the entire school students’registration,course selection,result statistics and management,learning information consulting and other service functions.“Teaching research and training center”is to provide services for the first line of teaching teachers on the job and technical training,the organization of teaching demonstration class observation,accessing to teaching process information and quality evaluation data and so on.These two centers can separate the management work of the school from the specific work,simplify the work procedure,shorten the process time,and improve the efficiency.As a result,it is not only to streamline staff but also to break away from specific affairs to engage in higher-level management such as decision support with more time and energy for management departments and subordinate teaching units.(Wen,2008,pp.153-156;Zhu,2013,pp.48-50;Li,2013,pp.114-116).

The institution setting and function division of teaching management in foreign colleges and universities are different from that in China.Such as student status management,course selection guidance,management of teaching resources,formulation of professional plans and all matters related to teaching operation are under the unified management of the university,and there is no separate educational administration department within the department(Wang,et al.,2011,pp.19-23;Li,et al.,2011,pp.142-143).

It is not suitable to the work needs of our departmental educational administration by reengineering the whole process or stimulating the enthusiasm of staffs simply.What we need is to conform to the workflow and program under the management of college and department.To this end,we conducted an open questionnaire survey on 74 students from grade 2016 to grade 2019 of Management Department and more than 30 teachers from the Management Department,Mathematics Department,Sports Department and other departments.Students and teachers were asked to put forward any opinions and suggestions related to educational administration anonymously.A total of 90 valid questionnaires were collected involving 138 questions.

Fig.1 Classification diagram of solicitation problems

The questions collected can be divided into six categories shown as Fig.1.

1.Work progress can be accelerated by optimizing the working process.This kind of questions mainly aims at the educational administration work itself,which is mainly caused by the long working cycle leading to the heavy workload.Taking students’special course selection as an example,(the normal course selection can be made by students themselves on Internet at specific time,this paper analyzes the parts that need to be handled manually by departmental educational administrators),including relearning course selection and extra course selection of transfer students,our management department has more than 80 applicants for courses selection in each semester,involving more than 300 courses.According to the traditional method of course selection,it often needs 1 week to 3 weeks from submitting application form to the curriculum appearing in the students’personal schedule,during which including auditing the qualification of students’course selection,finding the corresponding courses in educational administration management system,inputting the student number to increase new elective records etc.Similarly,there are similar problems in auditing teachers'workload and arranging students’exams.

2.Workflow and contents need to be standardized.This kind of problem is mainly caused by the unskilled staff and irregular working process,involving counselors,teachers and students related to educational administration management.Such as some students put forward to do a business to fill in a lot of forms,to get teachers’guidance before the course selection,to know what should be taken and how many credits can be got,while teachers put forward to want to know what kind of forms should be used for doing the specific business and so on.At present,the educational administration management system is not perfect,and there is not a set of work flow and work standards for reference,resulting in different work priorities and working methods of various grass-roots units,even that it appears non-uniform format of statistical data and summary forms.In addition,we do not have complete induction training for new employees,although some routine work is carried out every semester,some unskilled employees will ask repeatedly how to do the work and what forms to be used when they do it again.

3.A considerable number of respondents are unable to offer any comments or suggestions.Such questionnaires are open to all participants in educational administration management.One third of the respondents could not point out any questions.The first reason is that the existing educational administration work could already meet the basic needs of students and teachers.Second,the majority of students and teachers are not involved in the management of educational administration management so the expectations of them are not high.

4.There are some comments related to equipment maintenance and management of the school.For example,students proposed that the course selection system often breaks down,resulting that those elective courses and physical education classes often cannot be chosen.Other problems were reported by some students like they can’t see the blackboard clearly by aging projectors.

5.There are some suggestions related to the formulation of teaching program.For example,some students hoped to arrange less courses in the 7th semester to facilitate internship,postgraduate entrance examination and entrepreneurship,and other students hoped to have more opportunities for practice and competition.

6.There are something related to optimal work methods at the school level.For example,some teachers put forward whether these can be done in system,such as the audit and printing of the examination papers,filling in the analysis of the examination papers and completing the course adjustment.And they hope that the results of some practical courses can be imported to system uniformly like the public courses to reduce the chance of manual input errors,etc.

Problem Solving

In this study,we adopt three lean thinking methods to analyze and solve the first three types of problems related to educational administration management that could be solved in the department,including process analysis,job standardization and continuous improvement.

1.For the first kind of problems,we adopt the method of process analysis to analyze each link in the workflow in details,and we use the analysis method of E(Eliminate),C(Combine),R(Rearrange),S(Simplify)and I(Increase)to optimize specific contents and shorten the working cycle.

Fig.2 Comparison of traditional course selection process and optimized process

Taking the process of students’course selection as an example,it can be seen from Fig.2 that it requires 6 steps to process each piece of data by the traditional working methods.To handle more than 300 course applications data for each semester,it takes at least 1 minute to process each piece of data.For example,it has to open the students’transcript,to sort the scores according to the course name,to find the corresponding courses and to judge the times of retaking for the examination of students’course selection qualification.These workloads are huge.

While in the optimization process,we eliminate the audit part which takes the longest time for two reasons.Firstly,it will bring the low probability of error.Secondly,even if there is a mistake,it can also be found and corrected in the credit review work(the routine work at the beginning of the next semester)without additional workload.We simplify the specific course selection procedure by replacing manual input with e-form import and add the part for students to fill in the e-form.Students only need to fill in the student number,course number and course identification.After optimization,it takes less than 5 minutes to process all the data,which greatly improves work efficiency and reduces labor intensity.

2.For the second category problem,we come up with a process--“Tianjin University Renai College Management Department educational administration work flow”,standardizing the work related to educational administration management.This process is formed by means of analyzing and evaluating the core business process of the educational administration work,and sorting and classifying the purpose and relevance of various tasks carefully at the same time.It lists the name,the purpose and significance of each business,the time node of the beginning and completion,the specific operation method,the subject of responsibility,the matters needed to be attention,the required forms etc.in an academic year in chronological order.Through the optimization and standardization of the work process,we form institutional documents to guide the work and to guide new teachers.Meanwhile,it helps to overcome the subjectivity and randomness of educational administration and to reduce redundant communication.

3.It should encourage proposals and improve it continuously.On the one hand,we should give play to the role of“people”while lean thinking places a strong emphasis on full participation.Full participation concentrates the collective wisdom and talents of employees effectively and it brings huge benefits to the organization.Full participation makes employees highly motivated and enthusiastic,and it is able to find problems in the process actively and to be improved constantly.

On the other hand,it should work on the basis of standardization for continuous improvement.Through the learning,implementation and accumulation of the process,the advanced methods and experience will be standardized,so that the staff can put forward effective improvement suggestions on the standard,and these insights will be incorporated into the new standard.In this way,when the employee changes,the learning experience can be passed on to the employee who takes over the position without the team’s advanced experience being lost due to the change and turnover of staff.Improvements need to be“continuous”rather than“one-step”,and even managers who are proficient in lean production and lean thinking cannot think about and solve all problems at once.

We have adopted a variety of forms to encourage proposals,such as opening the office network“educational administration mailbox”function,receiving questions from students and teachers at any time.In combination with the students’symposium and teachers’symposium of mid-term teaching inspection,the participants are asked to give their opinions and suggestions on educational administration in the form of anonymity or real name.If the proposal is adopted,students can get bonus points for quality development and also teachers can get bonus points for performance appraisal and so on.Up to now,we have received many valuable comments and suggestions,which have been improved into the existing workflow and regulations.I believe that more teachers and students will be involved in this work in the future.

Conclusion

To adopt lean thinking in educational administration,students should be placed in an important position firstly.It should be taken as measures of educational administration work by the time and effort spent on any business,as well as the level of comfort.Let students flow through the system smoothly and without repetition.With the goal of global optimization of the overall process,it should focus on the overall quality of work,design and optimize the activities in the process,minimize ineffective activities,and achieve the best management effect with minimal resources.

Secondly,the process and method of relevant work should be popularized in the whole system,so as to solve most of students’problems in a team with less personnel and more skills.That’s why we optimize our workflow.With the business process as the core,it is in order to achieve the goal of improving management efficiency and management level through the optimization of key work items,highlighting the key business and reducing the worthless business.

Thirdly,it should highlight the cultivation of people and establish the awareness of continuous improvement,which is to motivate and give play to the enthusiasm and creativity of teachers and managers.The more front-line employees,the more familiar they are with the work that they are responsible for,and the easier it is to find better working methods.Although the business content is fixed,the business process can be improved continuously.Problems are found and solved in the repeated work process from semester to semester,and timely improved into the business process.Leaving the wisdom of“people”and the results of management innovation in the business process so that it can improve and update itself and always represent the most advanced level of productivity.

Finally,it should formulate reasonable and effective rules and regulations as a safeguard.According to the characteristics of the educational administration work,we should establish scientific,reasonable and effective rules and regulations combining with the specific work content to make educational administration work have“law”to be followed and have rules to be undertaken.Therefore,it will make educational administration work be ordered,standardized and efficient by managing the school in“law”,managing the education in“law”and managing research in“law”.