UNH sets RCM system forums

By Lori Wright, Media Relations

UNH will hold two public forums in February to give the university community the opportunity to discuss the Responsibility Center Management (RCM) budgeting system, which is undergoing a five-year review.

The first forum will be held Wednesday, Feb. 2, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in MUB Theater I and the second is Thursday, Feb. 24, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in MUB Theater II. The public forums are part of a comprehensive, five-year review of RCM, a decentralized budgeting system implemented July 2000.

“These public forums are an opportunity for members of the university community to participate in our critical review of RCM that will consider the impacts of RCM and identify areas where refinement of the model may be required,” said Candace Corvey, vice president for finance and administration. In addition to the forums, information will be 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.

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.

“Our former centralized, incremental approach to budgeting simply did not work well in situations requiring flexible, creative responses to financial problems. It tended to favor the status quo and it encouraged short-sighted and inefficient budgetary behavior, a situation that pleased no one,” Corvey said.

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. “That lack of clarity made matters worse by breeding an undesirable degree of mistrust in the university community in regard to our financial affairs,” Corvey said.

In FY06, after the completion of the fifth year of RCM, the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and the vice president for finance and administration will co-chair a review committee to assess the effectiveness of RCM as the university’s budget management and resource allocation system. With the Academic Plan as the foundation, the review committee will analyze the extent to which UNH has achieved greater efficiency and effectiveness in curriculum, research/outreach, and administration under RCM.

The RCM review committee will submit its report and recommendations 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/.