A little over a year after embarking on an NCAA Executive Committee-directed review of the Association’s committee structure, the national office staff is implementing steps to achieve greater efficiency in — and reduce costs of — committee administration.

The effort, which already has mapped steps toward cutting costs by 25 percent over the next three to five years, also has spurred a review of the three membership divisions’ legislative cycles and is expected to produce criteria later this year for evaluating the size of the Association’s approximately 130 standing committees.

The Executive Committee recently reviewed staff actions that already have resulted from the first year of the effort, including:

n A plan to establish individual budgets for each committee beginning with the 2006-07 budget year (based on review of past committee expenditures and the anticipated introduction of steps to achieve more efficiency in operations), and to assign responsibility to staff liaisons for ensuring that committees operate within the budget.

n A directive to schedule two of every three meetings of a committee in Indianapolis (an increase from the previous requirement that committees hold 50 percent of meetings in the city).

n A related policy that meetings scheduled outside of Indianapolis generally should be held in cities where meeting costs are within 10 percent of the cost of Indianapolis-based meetings. (The national office staff currently lists 28 cities within the continental United States where meetings can be scheduled in accordance with the policy without advance approval.)

n Plans by about 20 committees — including the Executive Committee, Division I Board of Directors and Management Council, and Divisions II and III Presidents and Management Councils — to reduce in-person meetings, and in several cases to replace those meetings with sessions using technologies such as video and webconferencing.

While implementation of those plans should yield measurable cost savings, that isn’t the only objective of the effort, said Delise O’Meally, NCAA director of governance and membership, who is responsible for coordinating staff administration of committees.

“For the most part, people understand that this drive is both cost reduction and efficiency,” said O’Meally, who reported to the Executive Committee and other governance groups during the January Convention on actions already taken or in progress regarding committee operations.

“The sense I’m getting, during the reports I’ve been giving, is the reduction in committee meetings and the greater efficiency of the process seems to resonate with most people — particularly in the upper-level governance groups.”

The effort actually began in fall 2004, when Bernard Franklin, NCAA senior vice-president for governance and membership services, convened a staff working group to study the committee structure, examine operations and seek ways to improve efficiency. The Executive Committee provided additional guidance in January 2005 when, among other things, it directed the staff to explore committee cost reductions.

Steps taken thus far are the result of recommendations from the staff working group, and now staff members who serve as committee liaisons are consulting with the three divisions’ governance staffs and the national office finance and operations staff to determine the best ways to achieve greater efficiency and savings while ensuring that committees are able to perform their duties effectively.

“We’re going to try it because we see benefits, in terms of increased efficiency and reduction in costs, and quite frankly, reduction in people’s time,” O’Meally said.

Time reductions are expected to accrue not only from reductions in the number of meetings, but from efforts to tighten agendas and reduce meeting days, while cost reductions should result from giving staff liaisons more direct authority and accountability for committee budgets than ever before.

“That’s where, I believe, we’re going to get most of the cost savings,” O’Meally said. “The 25 percent reduction, in and of itself, is going to create cost savings, but the accountability that comes with individually managing the budget will pay dividends. People will be more cognizant of where they go, the length of the agendas and how long they spend in a particular place.”

However, while it will be relatively simple to measure year-to-year cost savings, it will be more challenging to measure improved efficiency.

“One of the ways in which we’ll probably achieve it is to take a critical look at our meetings,” O’Meally suggested. “We hope that we — the staff and the committee — can streamline the agenda in such a way that we’ll accomplish our goals for the meeting more efficiently and more effectively.”

Several membership councils and committees — including the Division III Presidents Council and more recently the Executive Committee — also have experimented with various methods for reducing paperwork, such as repackaging agenda supplements into more concise or even paperless forms.

“It forces us to change the way we present materials — we try to present it in a more interactive, effective manner,” O’Meally said. “At our most recent Executive Committee meeting, we had computer screens in front of members, and the meeting mostly was paperless. We thought it worked very well, because, No. 1, it required us to be more concise with our materials — you can’t just upload pages and pages of documents to the screens. That’s not effective. We think it also helped keep the presidents engaged and helped in their decision-making.”

In other cases, committees actually have been experimenting with alternative ways of conducting meetings — using teleconferencing, videoconferencing and webconferencing capabilities. O’Meally admits, however, it has proven challenging to find the right technology for some meetings.

“We’re still pushing videoconferencing as an alternative when appropriate, as well as webconferencing and teleconferencing, especially when the agenda is light,” she said. “But we’ve had mixed reviews, to be honest. One camp says technology may not lend itself to a good meeting — you can’t interact, you can’t see people, you can’t get a sense of where they are. But there are others who say it saves a day and a half of travel, and depending on the time of the year, that can be very beneficial.”

For the foreseeable future, staff liaisons will continue to search for the best mix of real and virtual meetings.

“We’re going to try to find efficiencies as we go along, spurred, of course, by these reductions that will force us to some degree to do a better job of planning,” O’Meally said.

Legislative cycle

The most noteworthy reductions thus far are tentative plans by the Executive Committee and the three divisions’ governing bodies to each cut one of their four meetings annually. The Division I Management Council already has decided to try eliminating its July meeting this year, while Divisions II and III are working through how their own efforts to scale back would affect legislative cycles before deciding how their meetings will be scheduled during 2007.

Another staff working group currently is completing a comprehensive review of legislative cycles, and likely will present recommendations to the governance bodies this spring based on their assessment of advantages and disadvantages of current cycles, possible alternatives, and the effect of those alternatives on committee operations and the governance process.

Issues raised by possible changes in a cycle range from how alternation of the process would impact the membership — for instance, in scheduling conference meetings to propose legislation or take positions on other sponsored proposals — to the possibility that varying divisional cycles would reduce current opportunities to bring together representatives from all of the divisions at common meeting sites.

“There are various opinions on whether the divisions need to continue meeting together. Some believe that’s a priority,” O’Meally said, noting concerns she has heard that separate meetings of the Management Councils or divisional presidential bodies could adversely affect efforts to maintain a unified Association.

“For a group like the Executive Committee, it’s logistically better if the three divisions meet together, but some think we can work around that. Others believe they should have some flexibility to meet when it’s most important to do so.”

O’Meally expects considerable discussion of all proposed changes in cycles before any actually would be enacted.

“If there are changes proposed that are legislative, obviously that will go through the appropriate channels,” she said. “If there are changes proposed to policies — such as when legislative proposals are submitted, which would impact conference meetings — those would go through the appropriate structure as well. So most changes likely will be vetted through the structure. The changes would have to be minor — housekeeping in nature — for us to go ahead on our own.”

Committee size

A third phase of the committee review effort — which also will revolve around a staff working group review — is just getting started.

While efforts to date have focused on helping committees as they currently exist operate more efficiently, there also is interest in looking more closely at whether the committees themselves are appropriately sized to complete their work effectively.

O’Meally said the staff working group responsible for that effort during the next few months will consider whether objective criteria can be created for use in reviewing current committees’ size.

“We don’t know at this point what they will come back with, but I’d anticipate they will come back with certain objective statements to outline, ‘If the committee does this, and this, and this, then X, Y and Z,’ ” she said.

Given the current drive toward reducing costs and improving efficiency, it might be natural to assume that one easy way to accomplish that goal would be to reduce the number of people serving on committees. And it might be true, O’Meally said, there may be instances where a smaller, more manageable committee may be able to work more efficiently and effectively.

 However, she said such decisions should be based on a careful, objective review of a committee’s personnel needs and workload.

“We want to make sure, if at any point there is a recommendation to seek reductions, that we are not doing it in a vacuum, and that the committees have enough people to do the work appropriately.”