Clear Roles and New Career Paths

UZH’s revamped financial organization aims to provide better support for leaders and managers in financial matters and to clarify role assignments. Managers will be able to use the financial resources available to them more effectively and strategically, while their scope for shaping research and teaching activities also increases.

The groundwork for the university’s new financial organization was done by the Finance Office between 2022 and 2023. As part of the Financial Management of UZH project, four “roles” that are important in every financial unit were standardized (see box), and three models for organizing the finances of a unit were developed – and this was done taking into account the specific situation at UZH.

These changes have been under way across the units of UZH since the beginning of 2024, if necessary with support from the newly created Finance Integration Office. Going forward, this office will serve as the first point of contact for matters relating to financial management.

But change things in the first place? Wasn’t the previous system working quite well in the around 300 units of UZH?  “Yes, as long as everything is business as usual.  But when new people join a team, things get more complicated,” says Kerstin Press, who manages the implementation of the financial organization under the project. “Onboarding new department/institute or administrative heads can take a long time because each unit has built up its own financial organization.” Functions that bear the same name – administrative head, for example – can have quite different tasks, with some people only doing budgeting, some also doing forecasting, while others do neither. If processes go beyond one’s own organizational unit, this makes finding the right contacts quite challenging. “People in new roles have to figure this all out first.”

The increasing pressure on the public sector to cut spending is also ramping up the financial pressure on the various units at UZH. Fewer and fewer additional funds are available for new projects. In the next few years, UZH units will therefore increasingly have to repurpose their existing financial resources and streamline their processes to be able to implement new ideas in a cost-neutral manner. This new approach requires a common understanding of financial management. Leaders and managers need to know where resources exist, where overly complex processes may have crept in, when funding will free up, what their planning for professorial chairs looks like, and so on. 

Not all UZH units currently have employees who carry out financial analyses and manage their finances. “That’s a disadvantage – very few developments can be realized without money,” says Press.

Resource managers handle budgets and forecasts and acquire the knowledge needed to provide the financial data that matter when developing their unit. In a large department or dean’s office, for example, they can analyze what it would mean financially if the student-instructor ratio were adjusted – which would have a positive impact not only on teaching and research, but also on the rating of the university as a whole.

“By introducing the role of resource manager, unit heads will gain a skilled and networked partner with whom they can discuss financial matters,” says Press. “We recommend involving them in all of the unit’s financial discussions.” Small units are also expected to benefit from expert-level resource management – by sharing the function with other units.

A welcome side effect of standardizing these roles is that it opens up new career paths at UZH. Employees in these roles will be able to switch to other units more easily than before. According to Kerstin Press, this will make it easier to recruit new staff for these tasks. The medium-term goal is to expand networking among the units and build up a finance community at UZH that can share its knowledge with others and create the financial basis on which UZH can continue to advance as a whole.