First public forum about RCM held

By Lori Wright, Media Relations

In its five years as UNH’s decentralized budgeting model, Responsibility Center Management has helped foster a greater understanding of budgeting at the department level and greater collaboration at the institutional level.

Those were among the comments made at the first campuswide public forum about Responsibility Center Management, or RCM, which is undergoing a five-year review to refine and enhance the system.

The second public forum will be held Thursday, Feb. 24, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in MUB Theater II.

RCM provides incentives and empowers the major components of UNH to achieve their goals in a more efficient manner by placing greater responsibility and authority for budgetary, spending and resource allocation decisions at the level of deans and other unit heads and by ensuring that units that are more productive receive more resources.

It came about after years of serious resource constraints resulting from cost cutting and budget rescissions, a situation that has and is expected to continue for many years. A lack of a clear, effective connection between the budgeting system and the broad, complex resource allocation problems confronting the university exacerbated the problem.

RCM has lead to several positive outcomes, among them: increased discussion and understanding about the impact of program and budgetary decisions made by faculty and deans; more collaborative budget processes at the institutional and unit levels; improved attentiveness to student needs (more sections, new programs, restructuring of existing programs; and redesigned processes at service unites to increase efficiency.

“It’s also allowed for longer-term views for planning. Under the old system, units only focused on how they were going to spend that money for that year. There weren’t any guarantees about what was going to occur in the following years. For future years, you basically got what you received in the current year plus money for salary increases. Your enrollments and research activity could have increased or decreased, but you would have received the same budget,” said David Proulx, senior financial analyst and RCM project manager.

“Now we have a formula that can project out multi years so units can get a ballpark figure of what their resources are going to be. And we have a carry-forward policy that allows departments to carry forward unspent funds from one year to the next,” he said.

The restructuring and realigning of budgets based on student demand has had a substantial impact on the general budgets for several units, most notably the Whittemore School, which has seen its annual growth in its general fund budget increase more than 13 percent from FY01 to FY05. UNHM saw its budget grow nearly 9 percent and Research and Public service increased more than 7 percent, in the same period. At the same time, budgets in central administration, including Academic Affairs, have grown at more modest rates of around 5 percent annually.

“The Whittemore School has had the highest growth, primarily due to undergraduate, graduate and executive development programs. If we had looked at this for the five years prior to RCM, it would have been flat – everybody grew at the same rate because it was all controlled by the central administration and the allocation process didn’t reflect changes in activity,” Proulx said.

In addition to the forums, information is being solicited from vice presidents, deans, associate deans, department chairs, Faculty Senate, research directors from both inside and outside colleges, staff councils, RCM unit heads and other interested parties.

The RCM review committee will submit its report and recommendations regarding improvements to RCM to the president by June 30, 2006. The report should include a recommendation for a long-term review cycle of RCM. For more information on RCM and the five-year review, visit http://www.unh.edu/rcm/.