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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This article describes how the concept of business process improvement was successfully applied to the advising process at a College of Business in a mid-sized public university in western Pennsylvania. The cost of improvement was very minimal, yet it resulted in less wastage of time and effort for all constituents: the students, faculty and office staff. Although the main focus of the project was to achieve efficiency of the advising process, there was an unexpected positive outcome: the quality of advising also improved.
Keywords: Advising, Process Improvement, Flow Process Chart, Service Improvement
INTRODUCTION
It has been long concluded that academic advising plays a very important role in academic success of all students and more so for students with marginal academic preparation (Fowler & Boylan, 2012; Bahr, 2008; Vivian, 2005). In spite of its importance and impact on students, many-but not all-faculty members treat academic advising as an unpleasant task (Karr-Lilienthal et al., 2013), especially when their efforts are not recognized for the tenure and promotion decisions. For example, Karr-Lilienthal et al. (2013) quote some faculty who expressed frustration with academic advising: they considered it a "time sink"-a waste of time, "you don't need someone with a Ph.D. to pick out or check a student's classes," we are "always in a catch up mode with curriculum changes," etc. Many programs at large universities have relegated the "unpleasant chore" of undergraduate advising to advising centers that are staffed by peer-advisors, supervised by a faculty member or graduate student. At small to mid-size universities, academic advising is typically the responsibility of the teaching faculty.
This article is based on the authors' experience with about 800 majors in a department with 13 faculty members at a mid-sized public university located in western Pennsylvania. It must be noted that the number of majors in the department had been steadily increasing from approximately 400 students 10 to 12 years ago, to the current number of about 800 majors. Given that the department has only 13 faculty members at the time of the writing of this paper, each faculty member has a load of advising about 60 students. In addition to the expectation of excellent classroom performance, the college's accrediting body emphasizes both quality advising, and scholarly output from...