ASSESSING THE POTENTIAL FOR CHANGE 59 activities with less time and effort. You may be able to create some efficiencies in effort, creating space for additional duties. People working across categories (e.g., working in research, faculty affairs, and curriculum) are unlikely to work as efficiently as those who work within categories (e.g., focus only on supporting research). Further, you may be able to create efficiencies across the college by centralizing services. For example, Bret is considering centralizing all travel services for his col- lege. As software used for this is cumbersome and frequently changing, having a few people in the dean’s office with that responsibility should reduce the total staffing needs in departments. The most likely way to add effort, however, is to add positions. As people are add- ed to the dean’s office, how they are deployed is a primary driver in shifting among organizational models (see Figure 2.10 in Chapter 2). Which people to add to your office (e.g., exempt or non-exempt staff, divisional associate deans) requires careful consideration as a general goal should be to maximize efficiency while minimizing financial and political costs. How Quickly is Change Needed? The above assessments can provide insight into the need for changing where or how much effort is used in the dean’s office. Using your intuitive sense that change may be needed, you now are aware of other factors that have come into play through your environmental scan. For example, perhaps you cannot finish all the assigned reports expected from your office. Or maybe no one in your office possesses anything resembling a work-life balance. Perhaps the position of department chair in your college has a huge rate of turnover and faculty are reluctant to step into open chair positions. Change may be needed more quickly in some cases than in others. Change invariably involves resources. Some resources may be “one-time use,” such as an investment of time to develop a new policy or purchasing new software and training the office staff in its use. Other costs are ongoing in nature as with a new person and the associated office and ongoing professional development ex- penses. To explore if the timing might be right for a change of organization or staff- ing in your office given the university context, it is helpful to explore the following questions. You are trying to construct an answer to the invariably asked question of “why now?” • Will the proposed change in organizational structure actually help address the office’s current shortcomings you identified through the exercises in this chapter? • Do the needed changes in services align with either the university or college strategic plan?