Making the Model Work
Our goal is to allow Temple University to operate in the most cost-effective manner by allowing those closest to the action to make critical funding decisions. One of the key ways that Temple keeps this focus has been the work and continual oversight of our university's Cost and Services Committee.
For more insights, please see the following resources:
- RCM Basics & July 2024 Changes to the Model: Overview of Temple's budget model with recommended changes
- Making the Temple Budget Work: Temple Budget Primer
- What have we learned about the model since FY2015: Overview of our 2018 and 2021 Reviews
- Benchmarking administrative services to ensure efficiency: Temple joined a university benchmarking consortium in 2017
Annual Workbooks & Assessment
Each year our university support units are invited to submit a 'workbook' to profile how the unit has leveraged the tools of RCM to achieve excellence, support quality service and efficiency, and advance Temple's mission. The annual workbook serves a few purposes for us and came into being the year we implemented RCM (FY2015).
Workbooks are completed with the expectation that the content will be shared widely and especially with the deans and officers who are keenly interested in what we do and how we do it. In the RCM environment, the workbooks become evidence of the guiding principles in action where we demonstrate that our resources are closely aligned with mission, transparent in their use and outcomes, and decisions are accountable at the unit level.
The workbooks are also important to the Cost & Services Committee, and their role in evaluating the effectiveness of existing services provided by central units, reviewing and approving internal charges, and establishing a performance management framework for each service provider (including KPIs and SLAs where needed).
And finally, along with our assessment reports, these tools serve as evidence of the linkage between planning, resources and institutional improvement. Demonstration of how the department continuously ties assessment activities with resource allocation decisions, and shares widely how university priorities and investments in those priorities are connected, is how we contribute to the effort.