Established in 2000 in response to the aftermath of Project X, Consulting Services provides a wide variety of services to the Division of Finance as well as other administrative units at Yale.  Our function is to provide assistance to our colleagues on specific projects, working with them on a short or long term basis, as appropriate.  Projects are assigned by the Associate Vice President for Finance and staff is drawn from other areas of Finance and Yale to work with us on projects within their area of expertise.

Within the Division, we function as the Business Office, relieving our colleagues of routine administrative tasks and assisting them with those administrative tasks that are central to their operation, such as budgeting.  Being the Division Office for budget preparation and monitoring, equipment purchase coordination, human resource matters and space issues allows us to experience the successes and frustrations of our colleagues in Business Offices across campus.  This experience makes us more valuable in our interactions with our colleagues.

This group provides leadership as well as administrative support for the End User Input Coordinators, an influential group of administrators who regularly interact with an assigned group of business colleagues.  Their purpose is to represent the concerns of distributed users across campus to the administrative leadership of the University and to report any action or reaction back to their colleagues.  In an environment that sometimes seemed like chaos, the End User Input Coordinators focused the needs of the business community following the Oracle implementation.  That focus allowed the leadership of the University to spend money and effort on projects that had the greatest positive impact on the campus business community.  The work of this group will continue until administrative excellence is attained.

Consulting Services works closely with the Integrated Administrative Systems group, assisting with project definition and management.  We are responsible for all of the budgeting, expenditure approval, and monitoring for all projects that fall outside the scope of normally funded operations.  These projects were mostly system related from 2000 through 2002, but that focus is shifting. With much of the systems work behind us, we hope to focus on the needs of the administrative staff that use these systems.

Major past successes for Consulting Services include the following projects:

• Defined and documented the strategic goals for the Procurement Department
• Clarified and simplified the interrelationships between the Finance budget and the ITS budget for the Budget Office
• Created and implemented a performance management system for use within the Division of Finance
• Determined end user concerns by collecting issues from distributed users and obtaining responses from responsible parties in an effort to obtain funding and fix major problems for the End User Input Coordinators

While the specific projects may change, the goal of Consulting Services remains the same: 

• Provide centralized services within the Division of Finance where shared services reduce the overall workload
• Provide the Division of Finance with new or modified procedures and programs
• Assist the End User Input Coordinators in pursuing their goal of administrative excellence
• Support units with project definition and project management as assigned by the Associate Vice President for Finance
• Manage aspects of specially funded projects as required