April 10, 2025

We're excited to run through the last batch of submissions to this year's CU Innovation & Efficiency Awards Program. Check out the following for some great approaches to training, finance, and HR activities.

Coffee & Conversation with the Administrative Team (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • What can happen when you move from a reactive approach (answering questions that pop up, sometimes last minute) to a proactive approach? A year-long monthly series of 45-minute training sessions on a variety of fiscal and administrative topics to support faculty and professional research assistants. Topics are chosen by department members and participation/response has been rewarding. 
  • Read about it here!

Fiscal Onboarding for Project Staff (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • A new onboarding program focused on administrative tasks is creating efficiencies for both administrative and project teams, with training on both general and role-specific issues saved to the department's YouTube channel for easy review/revisiting. 
  • Read about it here!

Funding Distribution Across Departments (Anschutz Medical Campus) 

  • With this project, administrative staff receive automated notifications of funding distribution changes, including a templated email to send to individual employees' administrators regarding the change. This has reduced expenditure mistakes, cut down on the need for PETs, and facilitated communication for multiple departments.

Change of Major/Minor Automated Robot Process (Boulder Campus)

  • A manual (and in-person!) process has been transformed to an online automated procedure for declaring majors and minors. The robot automates the record changes and an OnBase form allows for immediate notification to students and deans.
  • Read about it here!

Microsoft Dataverse for Department Data Storage (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • An ongoing multi-year project to get department databases into a cloud-based environment and out of various spreadsheets, documents, and websites. Data requests can now be completed in minutes instead of days.
  • Read about it here!

Congratulations to all the successfully vetted submissions posted on the website. 

You can learn more about them by visiting our CU I&E Current Submissions page.

The selection committee is now reviewing all posted submissions in order to identify a group of finalists. The finalists form the pool for CU I&E cash prize consideration. We'll update you next week!