Innovation action for financial sustainability
A message from James W.E. Rush, Vice-President, Academic and Provost and Jacinda Reitsma, Vice-President, Administration and Finance.
Colleagues,
We are writing with an update on the University’s ongoing work to achieve operational efficiencies, address our structural budget deficit, and build on our institutional strengths. Our three-year plan to work towards financial sustainability includes a wide range of work across the institution to look at new ways of doing things.
Our ongoing functional reviews of our Finance, IT, and Marketing and Communications functions, facilitated by Nous Group, are approaching their reporting stage. We expect to receive final reports in March.
Once we receive these reports, we will take some time to review their recommendations and develop implementation plans that align with our strategic priorities and uphold our commitment to serving students, faculty, and staff in the most effective way possible. The decisions we take about the future of these critical functions will be made by À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ leaders, informed by Nous’ expertise.
Academic and business process innovation action
We know that there are many other parts of our campus that can benefit from review, innovation and reimagination – and that we have considerable expertise on campus that we can leverage to create change.
It’s with this expertise in mind that the Office of the Provost is developing an Academic Innovation Working Group. At its core, this internal group will explore how we can deliver our academic programs more efficiently, leverage technology to enhance teaching and learning, and create new revenue streams through program development.
The Academic Innovation Working Group will build on work already underway in the Faculties, the outcomes of other groups such as the Credentials Framework working group and initiatives across the university to develop alternative credentials. It will facilitate awareness, sharing, ideation and implementation of good ideas across unit boundaries. A coordinating group is being assembled to help define the streams of activity and then to assemble the working group membership. Further information on this group’s activities will be shared soon.
In parallel, we are establishing an Innovation Action Group under the leadership of Associate Vice-President, Innovation, Sanjeev Gill. This group is tasked with identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing process improvement opportunities across our administrative functions. This group will also coordinate closely with other ongoing optimization initiatives to ensure we approach change holistically. We will share details of members of this group and how units can engage them when appointments to the group are complete.
Benchmarking our services
To further bolster our capacity for data-driven decision-making, we will be partnering with , an international benchmarking initiative widely used by many of our Canadian peer institutions. UniForum helps participating universities understand how their administrative services are structured and what staff in these roles do. Through a robust evidence base, it will help us identify where and how we spend our resources, the associated costs, and the drivers behind these activities. Through the network of participating institutions, we will benefit from learning their best practices.
You can read more about UniForum on our Ìý·É±ð²ú²õ¾±³Ù±ð.
Looking ahead
We recognize that these combined efforts require additional time and energy from many people across campus, and we sincerely appreciate your commitment. The functional reviews, UniForum data collection, innovation projects, and academic program initiatives are interconnected strands of the same goal: to ensure À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ remains financially sustainable, true to our values, and ready to innovate in the face of future challenges.
We want to make sure you have information to help support you as we go through the changes we need to make. You can expect to hear more updates on our 2025/26 budget as we present it to our governance bodies in late March and early April. To give you a chance to hear from leaders directly, we’ll be holding a Town Hall in early April to provide you with more updates.
As always, if you have any questions, please reach out to budget@uwaterloo.ca or your respective VP offices.