56 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS addressed at all or addressed poorly. Of these marked activities, highlight the ones that should be addressed or improved and that your college has the ability to act upon. For example, if the university does not offer a structured program for onboard- ing new department heads, that is an activity for which your office could be responsi- ble. If no one on your staff is putting much thought effort into this, you have uncov- ered an opportunity to add an important service for the college. You should make a note of these responsibility gaps. But be careful not to list re- sponsibility gaps unnecessarily; many of these services may be centralized at the uni- versity. If you have a legal office that takes care of all referrals and it works smoothly this way, this is not an activity you should add to your office. You may find other instances where several people contribute to a common responsibility. Keep in mind that it is possible this is redundant or confusing for department heads and faculty to know which person to consult on that issue and may represent an operational inefficiency. Assessing the College’s “Standards of Practice” How can the data collected so far be used? Before drawing firm conclusions based on this information alone, consider reviewing your operations through the CCAS Standards of Practice (2013). These standards were developed and tested by the CCAS Board of Directors to provide a self-assessment instrument to explore the policies and procedures in place within a college. The intent of the Standards is to allow deans and members of their staff to evaluate their policies and procedures relative to best practices in colleges across the nation. The Standards of Practice has been widely presented at CCAS and other professional meetings, and many deans have used it as a self-assessment in- strument to review their compliance with these prac- tices. The document can be accessed at the CCAS website, www.ccas.net, under Resources > Standards of Practice. While the online document allows you to con- sider the presence or absence of policies, the as- sociated scoring rubric is quite helpful in better understanding the use of the policies and practices in a college. This Excel-based scoring rubric is avail- able to CCAS members from the www.ccas.net homepage under Resources > Standards of Practice > Standards of Practice Scoring Rubric. Non-members of CCAS can reconstruct the rubric scores from a paper-based exercise. To con- duct the self-assessment, provide e-copies of the rubric or copy the pages from the publication to each staff member in your office to complete this activity independently based upon their working knowledge of the college’s policies and practices. The intent of the Standards is to allow deans and members of their staff to evaluate their policies and procedures relative to best practices in colleges across the nation.