The Solution:

Activate cross-divisional change and empower employees to reduce institutional scheduling barriers

Equipped with a grant from the state of California, North Orange County was now able to take a deeper dive into a review of its current processes to determine what was working and what was not. Knowing that they also wanted to look at a scheduling tool, North Orange County contracted Ad Astra for assistance with the multi-pronged approach.

The first order of business: document business processes. This included holding multiple focus groups with those involved in scheduling on each North Orange County District campus. The focus groups gathered information about what was currently working and how to improve the process to make it more student centric. Ad Astra also conducted a Scheduling Index survey and a Higher Education Scheduling Index® (HESI), which examines more than 50 scheduling variables across more than 200 U.S. colleges and universities.

Using this information, Ad Astra presented North Orange County with a record of the roles and responsibilities of the current scheduling process and created a process flow chart for each campus, including a breakdown of the faculty compensation process, a known pain point.

Insights from the information gathering sessions uncovered a lack of consistency in scheduling processes across departments and divisions along with a tendency to repeat past schedules, which produced overlapping classes that did not consider student needs of time, place, and modality.

“The work from Ad Astra allowed us to see how our current scheduling processes were being hampered by an overly distributed process,” Stanco concluded. “With multiple people inputting information into the SIS on each campus, it was hard to keep scheduling methods consistent District-wide.”

Armed with documentation and process flow maps, North Orange County is now focusing on next steps, developing action items for a more strategic enrollment plan moving forward that focuses on student demand.