Operational Excellence in Academic Affairs

Prior to 2020, UC San Diego had been hard at work creating a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Innovation is in our DNA.

• In UC San Diego’s Strategic Plan, goal #5 encourages us to create an agile, sustainable, and supportive infrastructure by ensuring a dedication to service, people, and financial stewardship. This goal empowers us all to work as a team to examine our work and implement solutions to make our work better. 

Continuous improvement has been woven into our culture. 

• We began our transformation journey by selecting Lean Six Sigma, a powerful and measurable methodology that can provide a common vocabulary and set of practices that can be shared by all, regardless of role or project.   
• To date, we have trained 4500 individuals in Lean Six Sigma (White, Yellow, Green and Black belts) throughout the institution!  The impact of this training has been immediate and profound.
• As a campus, we have shifted the way we conduct business processes and deliver services by empowering staff and subject matter experts to drive change, and continuously seek opportunities to make improvements, large and small. 

In the spirit of continuous improvement, we have dedicated resources to operational excellence in Academic Affairs by creating the Center for Operational Excellence (COE). Over the next couple of months, we hope to highlight our successes in process improvement and share our lessons learned with other institutions. We invite you to celebrate the inspired solutions developed through the dedication and creativity of our Triton community.