FAS Task Force on Workforce Planning
FAS Task Force on Workforce Planning
The Task Force on Workforce Planning is charged to identify opportunities to build financial capacity for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and to propose a reimagined administrative model that supports faculty, students, and staff more effectively and efficiently.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make deliberate and sustainable changes that will reduce complexity in our administrative work and improve the support we provide for our teaching and research.
Reimagining the FAS Administrative Model
The FAS Task Force on Workforce Planning was convened in spring 2025 to address two connected challenges: the need to build long-term financial sustainability for the FAS, and the opportunity to create an administrative model that works better for the faculty, staff, researchers, and students who depend on it every day.
The diagnostic work, completed in the fall of 2025, confirmed that the FAS administrative model had become complex, fragmented, and difficult to navigate, creating frustrations and inefficiencies across the organization. Dean Hoekstra accepted the Task Force's recommendation to adopt a federated model for administrative services, and over the winter and spring, 10 design teams comprising more than 80 staff and faculty undertook the detailed work of applying that model to reimagine the FAS's core administrative functions.
Moving Toward Phase 3: Implementation
With the design work substantially complete, the FAS is now turning its attention to implementation. This summer, the FAS will transition to the new administrative structure, marking a meaningful shift in how administrative support is delivered.
For staff, the new model is designed to deliver something the current one has not always delivered: clearer roles and decision rights, consistent standards and tools, access to functional expertise, and real pathways for professional growth. Communities of practice will connect staff doing similar work across the FAS for the first time, creating opportunities to learn from peers and to share innovations more broadly. The goal is a model that is worthy of the talent and commitment that FAS staff bring to their work every day.
What Is a Federated Model?
The FAS is adopting a federated model for administrative services to balance the local, dedicated support faculty and students value with the consistency that comes from working more closely together across the FAS. This model clarifies what work happens where: many tasks belong near the people and departments and units they serve, while other tasks can be better managed in a shared, FAS-wide way. The federated model ensures staff have clearer roles, stronger support, and better opportunities to grow while supporting our teaching and research mission.
There are four types of organizational structures within the federal model the FAS will adopt. There may be one or multiple examples of these designs within a function or department.
Hub and Spoke
In a Hub and Spoke model, experts are embedded within departments or units—close to the students, faculty, and researchers they support—while remaining connected to a central coordinating function that ensures consistency, shared standards, and access to broader resources.
The Office of Physical Resources (OPRP) is already working this way. Facilities staff are assigned to specific buildings across the FAS, where they know the spaces, the systems, and the people. A central FAS office, OPRP, ties it all together.
Shared Services
In a Shared Services model, high-volume, transactional work—the kind of work that follows consistent processes and benefits from standardization—is consolidated into a centralized unit that manages it for the whole organization.
Harvard University IT (HUIT) is a familiar example. Rather than every department maintaining its own IT infrastructure, HUIT provides consistent technology services across the FAS.
Centers of Expertise
Centers of Expertise provide deep, specialized knowledge that all departments and units benefit from having access to when they need it.
An example of this is the Bok Center, which provides expertise and support on all aspects of teaching to faculty and instructors from across the FAS. This model enables rapid development and deployment of expertise on pressing challenges, such as teaching in the age of AI, promoting civil discourse in FAS classrooms, and recentering academics.
Local Support
Some activities are highly specific to the academic and research environment of a particular department or unit, making them difficult to standardize or scale through a community of practice and better suited to local delivery.
Technical staff in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) are an example of this. Staff who manage the department’s studios, film equipment, and production spaces bring intimate knowledge of the facilities, the students who use them, and the creative work happening there.
About Phases 1 and 2
The following summarizes the work completed across the first two phases of the Workforce Planning effort.
Phase 1: Diagnostic
Complete
During the first phase (diagnostic) of their work, the Task Force spent several months listening to faculty and staff and conducting a thorough review of the policies, business processes, systems, and staffing across the FAS.
Their findings showed that our existing model has become complex and difficult to navigate – marked by duplicative processes, decision-making ambiguity, and limited career growth opportunities for staff – creating frustrations and inefficiencies for both faculty and staff.
At the end of the first phase, Dean Hoekstra accepted the Task Force’s recommendation to adopt a federated model for administrative services — one that keeps the benefits of local, dedicated support for faculty and students while adding stronger coordination and consistency across the FAS.
Key Themes
- Individual staff must navigate a host of complex administrative systems and processes. For example, some Department Administrators use more than 60 administrative systems and processes with multiple layers of review, such as the 67 steps required to hire a staff member.
- Responsibilities and decision authority are often unclear, significantly slowing down work.
- The lack of role clarity is evidenced by the more than 1,500 unique job titles in the FAS. Support for administrative functions is often distributed across multiple offices. For example, research administration support is provided across five offices at different levels of the organization.
- More than a quarter of FAS staff serve as generalists, balancing responsibilities across finance, human resources, facilities, grants management, and other functions. These roles enable local responsiveness and continuity, but their broad scope can limit opportunities to deepen expertise and lead to inefficiencies when complex processes must be repeatedly relearned.
- The current administrative model makes it harder to build communities of practice or establish clear career pathways for staff that fully leverage our talent.
- When needs grow or are not adequately met, the response has often been to add staff rather than redesign processes or develop current staff skills.
- This has led to duplication as well as variable staffing levels for key functions and inconsistent service quality across units.
Phase 2 (Design)
Substantially Complete
The second phase (detailed design) is focused on designing the new administrative operating model through a thoughtful approach that will ensure it best supports the needs of the FAS community.
Over the winter and early spring, 10 design teams worked to clarify the services in each functional area, identifying work that may need to evolve or conclude, redesigning priority processes, and developing a proposed future organizational structure. This work was informed by input from across the FAS community, including faculty and staff advisory groups, individual and community meetings, surveys, and nearly 150 ideas submitted through an online Ideas Box.
The Task Force on Workforce Planning reviewed all draft plans and made final recommendations on process and organizational design changes to Dean Hoekstra, who reviewed them with senior FAS colleagues and functional leaders to ensure the proposed designs work together as a cohesive system across the FAS.
Design Teams
Nearly 80 FAS staff and faculty members comprised 10 design teams, tasked with reimagining our core administrative functions.
Each team included 4–8 team members: a Sponsor, Team Lead, and additional members, who brought deep experience as both providers and users of administrative services. Teams included Department Administrators, Executive Directors, and other colleagues representing all FAS Divisions and functional areas.
Design Team Sponsors and Leads
Sponsor: Sean Eddy, Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Lead: Lisa Mincieli, Director of Special Projects, Office of Faculty Affairs
Sponsor: Anna Cowenhoven, Chief Communications Officer and Dean of Communications
Lead: Lori LoTurco, Chief of Marketing
Sponsor: Zak Gingo, Chief of Campus Operations
Lead: Matt Stec, Senior Director of Facilities Operations
Sponsor: Nina Zipser, Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning
Lead: Kendra Barber, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
Sponsor: Mary Ann Bradley, Associate Dean for Administrative Operations
Lead: Maureen Berry, Director of Project and Change Management
Sponsor: Allen Aloise, Interim Chief Financial Officer
Lead: Katerine Gates, Chief of Staff to the Dean for Administration and Finance
Sponsor: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College
Leads: Jeita Deng, Dean for Administration and Finance, Harvard College; Tim Smith, Chief of Staff to the Dean of Harvard College
Sponsor: Manuel Cuevas-Trisán, Vice President for Harvard Human Resources
Leads: Nicole Breen, Managing Director, Human Resources Consulting; Jessica Bowne, Associate Director of Programs and Communications
Sponsor: Klara Jelinkova, Vice President and University Chief Information Officer
Leads: Andrew Juraschek, Managing Director for IT Strategy and Coordination; David Sobel, Associate Director for FAS Technology Strategy and Planning
Sponsor: Chris Stubbs, Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy
Leads: Kris Monahan, Chief Research Administration Officer; Kelly Morrison, Assistant Vice President, Office for Sponsored Programs
Task Force on Workforce Planning Committee Members
Nina Zipser (Chair), Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning, Special Advisor on Strategic Planning
Mary Ann Bradley, Associate Dean for Administrative Operations, FAS
Glenda Carpio, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
Manuel Cuevas-Trisán, Vice President for Human Resources, Harvard University
David Cutler, Dean of Social Science; Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics
Sean Eddy, Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Katherine Gates, Chief of Staff Office of the Dean for Administration and Finance, FAS
Klara Jelinkova, Vice President and University Chief Information Officer
Warren Petrofsky, Dean of Administration and Finance, FAS
Advisory Groups
Ensuring that faculty and staff perspectives inform the design of the FAS’s future administrative model is central to the work of the Task Force. Staff and faculty advisory groups were convened to provide feedback on proposals developed by design teams.
Staff Advisory Group Members
Becky Chetham, Executive Director, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Allied Institutions
Bridget Duffy, Assistant Director of HR & Finance, Harvard College Dean of Students Office
Jess Gauchel, Director of Administration and Operations, Department of Sociology
Marcy Holabaugh, Assistant Director for Administration, Office of Undergraduate Education
Laura Madden, Director of Administration, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning
Joanna Miller, Manager of Training & Education, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Irene Minder, Executive Director, Department of Mathematics
Andrea Moore, Executive Director, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Paris Sanders, Winthrop House Administrator, Harvard College Dean of Students Office
Penny Skalnik, Department Administrator, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
Ray Traietti, Director of Administration, Office for the Arts at Harvard
Emily Warshaw, Director of Administration, Theater, Dance & Media
Blake Williams, Director of Administration, Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Faculty Advisory Group Members
Randy Buckner, Interim Department Chair, Sosland Family Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience, Department of Psychology
Roger Fu, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Co-Head Tutor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Peter Girguis, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Co-Director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Elie Tamer, Louis Berkman Professor of Economics, Chair, Department of Economics
Justin Weir, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature
Naomi Weiss, Professor of the Classics, Chair, Department of the Classics
Frequently Asked Questions
The Task Force’s work is important for two reasons: to ensure the FAS’s long-term financial sustainability and to build an administrative model that better serves the needs of faculty, staff, researchers, and students—both of which are in direct service to our academic mission. In addition, the Task Force’s work to date revealed an administrative operating model that has become increasingly fragmented and difficult to navigate–creating frustrations for both faculty and staff.
The units considered in this effort included: Administration and Finance, the Dean’s Office, Faculty Affairs, the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), Harvard College, and the Divisions of Arts & Humanities, Science, and Social Science. Several units (and therefore the administrative functions within them) were out-of-scope for this initial review including: Athletics, Admissions and Financial Aid, the Division of Continuing Education (DCE), Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT), Libraries, Museums, and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
Design teams worked to gather broad input and to ensure that the perspectives of staff, researchers, and faculty were heard and considered in the design. Teams met with faculty and staff advisory groups, conducted individual and community meetings, sought input through surveys, and reviewed nearly 150 ideas submitted through an Ideas Box.
The new administrative model was developed through a process grounded in the work the FAS actually does, shaped by people who understand how the FAS administration operates, where it excels, and where there are challenges. Design teams began by mapping the full range of administrative tasks across the FAS to determine the best way to deliver each of them. Their recommendations were informed by community input, internal benchmarking, and careful analysis of how work is currently organized and where it can be improved. Proposals developed by design teams were reviewed by the Task Force on Workforce Planning and evaluated by Dean Hoekstra and senior FAS colleagues to ensure they are viable, sustainable, and aligned with the FAS’s teaching and research mission.
The FAS will transition to the new administrative structure this summer. Decisions will be communicated to staff clearly, directly and as early as possible. The process will be approached with care and respect for the people who have built and sustained the FAS.
News and Updates
Contact the Task Force
Have a question? Contact the Task Force at workforceplanning@fas.harvard.edu.