Why is university administration so slow and difficult to navigate?

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Just need a rant - why is trying to get anything done administration-wise at universities like wading through different layers of hell? I've been trying to sort out paying someone and it's like pulling teeth going through never-ending layers of crap. I'm so embarrassed for the external clients I'm trying to working with (and I'm not sure we'll ever get the work done at this rate with all these insane rules) as we look a shambles.

I've worked at so many universities and it just gets worse and worse at every place. This isn't a criticism of university admin staff as I've worked on this side and I know it's 'the rules' that are the issues, but god I'm so tired of how long it takes to get anything done or even just getting anyone done at all :(

It’s the constant restructuring and “tweaking” of processes by managers who don’t understand what we do. I work in uni admin and honestly am
despairing at the lack of joined up thinking . Everything now has to be a “process”. It’s embarrassing how slow we are at everything and so inefficient. Bring back the departmental secretary / I used fo be one and we did everything quickly and efficiently as we knew each other and who did what and a quick phone call
saying I need to pay this person - easy and quick. I feel for
the students and academics now it’s impossible
to
get anything done

And it will probably get worse because of budget cuts and lack of administrative support meaning everyone is over-extended. Also, people want work/life balance and In my department of 7 there is no one who even works full-time. All of this before you get to the ancient accounting systems that don’t talk to the systems/ databases in other departments.

ah yes... in my department, the norm seems to be
1 - non core hours, like " i work from 7am til 11am and from 3pm til 4.35pm"
2 - a non-working day somewhere mid week
3 - no friday afternoon

if anything urgent crops up, you ve got to hope it s not that urgent. Everyone got authorised to go on annual leave at the same time in our grad school and phd vivas are not getting processed.

It's impacting my ability to research and use my research funds so I'm doubly frustrated as well as embarrassed at how incompetent we look :/

It's a loss of institutional knowledge where I am. We've had a good chunk of very experienced staff leave in the restructuring processes of late and I've been passed through about 3 or 4 staff members over the course of getting this one payment through. Each of them have varying levels of knowledge and experience of 'the processes' so we definitely need to bring back a departmental secretary @heidi696

I've also been surprised at how hard it is to actually talk to someone and the lack of a single point of contact on issues hence all the confusion/misinformation. I honestly have no ideas how universities have survived working like this!

Ug! I’ve worked in universities for years and it just gets worse! Thankfully I’ve now retired early so the stress levels are coming down every week lol

Because most people that make big decisions are academics. That’s it really. I worked in higher education for close to 30 years. Also in the NHS when very young plus a brief stint in local government. I call it the triumvirate of evil. It’s why I’m so cynical probably.

I no longer invite any guest lecturers for my courses, even in the rare cases I get budget for it... Its too embarrassing when it comes to getting them paid. Finance demand the contractor jumps through hoops, and will loose their paperwork at least twice...they even if they admit fault, can't pay because the pay run won't happen for 6 weeks after sign off... its impossible.

I had an experience working as a visiting lecturer for Sussex uni - where I got paid about £1500 for my services. The universities (outsourced) payroll provider reported I'd been paid £80K over the course of a year... causing me to be emergency taxed from other income... I was eventually able to the tax refunded - it was a huge inconvenience that caused months of financial hardship.

Of course no apologies from Sussex... it seems they are even more chaotic then my current employer.

I think its a combination of some services been outsourced and Universities becoming increasingly managerial and bureaucratic. With no ability to be flexible.... e.g if a freelancer does a couple of hours for a guest lecture... they don't want to sign onto our payroll system for a £80. Most of them have a ltd company for tax purposes... but we don't allow guest lecturers to invoice... for er reasons... has to be done by payroll.

Its quite clear the idiots are in charge. I'm quite upset this week because one our schools idiot dean's has just been promoted to deputy VC... they fail upwards unfortunately

In defence of processes, they're basically the only way to approximate an equitable standard of service, and get done the boring nitty-gritty stuff that needs to be done. Especially when you're a small team having large amounts of data and problems thrown at you every day, and you're operating in an industry with regulations and standards crowding in on all sides.
*
In the case of things like visiting lecturers, I'd guess that there would have been a process, a budget, a means of dealing simply and smoothly with a hardly uncommon requirement once upon a time, but the knowledge got lost amid staff cuts and financial pressure.

I'm not normally a fan of having leaders cluttering up the place on huge salaries emitting publicity bumph like they've been eating beans all month, but having people at hand who can navigate the bureaucracy and get bits of it combining to push through helpful measures -- we do need that.

*actually, one area where there seems to be barely any regulation is partnership provision. Currently a wild west, probably one day a court case...

For us, budget cuts meant loss of much institutional memory & morale is very low. Then the support staff are lumbered with lots of "due diligence" tasks. I share OP's frustration. I've been trying to buy some equipment for 2 months. There is glitch with the approved ordering system and the only person who can fix the problem is not answering emails. <sigh>

At my institution it’s the result of endless restructurings. We’ve lost the people who know stuff and then hired other people at lower grades covering more stuff and they don’t know how to make anything happen. Then we have a plethora of part-time positions so if you email on a Thursday afternoon you won’t get a reply until the following Tuesday at least. Everything is slow and everything is inefficient and the people left who DO know what has to be done have their hands tied because there’ll be a roadblock in another department. I currently have a backlog of things to process, even though I work full time, because a quarter of my team is off sick. That’s one person.

It’s awful and all of us are embarrassed about it. I’m sorry.

Sending hugs to everyone in this position as I know it's partly the way things have always been in universities but it's been amplified by all the recent cuts. It really got to me today as I've been left picking up the pieces from the department's failings and I'm running around looking a fool. Surely this can't be a feasible way of working for anyone or a healthy working environment for academic and admin staff. But I don't know what a feasible solution, especially if more cuts are to come.

The pain in the arse of paying visiting lectures/anyone without a Ltd company is down to changes in the law and the university could faces substantial fines if they don’t go through payroll.

It’s not feasible in the long term and it’s horrible for all of us who’re left, academic or professional services, because it’s not working for anyone. I wish I knew what the answer was

Yes, this. A lot of is around legislation that is coming in.

The new cyber security bill, for example, is going to make procurement an absolute nightmare, because we'll be expected to do extensive due diligence on every supplier we deal with. Good luck trying to buy anything.

AMEN. It's the worst kind of hubris - we are very clever in thing A, therefore it follows that we are also very clever and competent in completely unrelated matters, such as running a large organisation.

But the alternative to that is having people in those positions who have little idea of how higher education works or what we are trying to deliver. We've just had a huge clearout of our university leadership, namely people appointed from industry who thought they were still running a luxury brand or a car manufacturer. It was a utter disaster and has caused lasting damage.

I agree it’s a bit of a hopeless case - only academics can run universities but they are exactly the sort of people who shouldn’t be running universities. And they are promoted into positions where they are managing specialist professional services and have no clue at all how to do it well.

Another issue is that professional services staff can often only be promoted/receive pay rises by changing roles, which leads to a lot of 'churn' and loss of knowledge/expertise.

All of the issues mentioned on this thread combine to render multiple essential processes completely nonfunctional.

This is infuriating and hard to justify given that there are still resources for the grand schemes that managers dream up to bolster their CVs for the next step up the ladder.

We need both academics and amazing business LEADERS as senior staff.

Much could be down via reviewing processes and then looking for IT solutions that would actually work and for the implementation to be properly funded and managed

And stop the restructuring without a cost benefit being completed. Recognise that good administrators are cheaper and better than academics having to do it themselves.