Cornell's plans to address its financial difficulty are taking shape, said Vice President for Human Resources Mary Opperman at a March 25 brown-bag lunch. "It has a feeling of being insurmountable unless we put it in perspective," she said. "It is a solvable problem, and we are solving it together."

To back up that point, Associate Vice President for Planning and Budget Paul Streeter emphasized that while this year's $68 million budget deficit might seem like a big number, it represents only 3.6 percent of the Ithaca campus's $1.9 billion operating budget.

"We are a big, very stable place," said Streeter, who co-hosted the Sage Hall event with Opperman. "The scale of our budget problem, though not something we can simply ignore, is important to keep in mind."

Nonetheless, many staff members "feel that the budget is being balanced on their backs, which doesn't make sense, because [the deficit] is a relatively small number," said Kevin Mannella, the Graduate School's director of human resources and operations finance. "It's not the change that people have a problem with, it's the uncertainty."

Opperman said she understood the stress and confusion. She attributed them to a combination of factors: the university's messages have been complex; the economic recession came without warning; staff are trying to do more work with fewer people; and the local, regional and national economies haven't recovered. "It's the cumulative pressure that makes folks want to ask, 'When is this going to be over?'" she said. She and Streeter assured the 50 participants that the administration is analyzing how to realign the top-priority work with the number of staff available to do it.

Sometimes a lack of information causes strain, some participants said. Tami Magnus, the library's business services director, said her unit is stressed by trying to create a budget for fiscal year 2011 (beginning July 1) without the necessary figures. The administration typically provides unit leaders with resource planning information in mid-February, but it has not finalized this information for fiscal year 2011 planning.

Staff and managers must adjust their expectations of what they can reasonably accomplish, given the amount and rate of change taking place, Streeter said. Make the best-informed budget plan by July 1 and monitor and adjust as necessary during the year, he advised. "We've got to allow ourselves some tolerance in this time of uncertainty."

It would be helpful if staff knew when recommendations from the Initiatives Coordination Office (ICO) would take effect, said Diane Edwards, business manager for the Department of Applied Economics and Management. "If you know you've only got one mile to go, you can probably keep up for that mile."

The ICO teams will make streamlining recommendations by May 1, but implementation will take time, said Streeter, who leads the ICO. He and Opperman encouraged Edwards to talk with supervisors to try to find ways to reduce her unit's workload.

What is "spans and layers," asked Manella, the Graduate School administrator, referring to a term that the administration has used in its cost-cutting efforts. "My wife thinks it's foundation garments," he quipped.

A spans-and-layers analysis is one of several tools the administration has used to think about how to organize the university with fewer staff. A span refers to the number of people reporting to a manager and layers refer to the number of hierarchical layers in the organization. Where it made sense, the analysis sought to reduce layers and increase spans to improve communication, increase effectiveness and reduce costs, Opperman said. "It was a difficult tool to apply, but people took it seriously and tried hard. In some places it was helpful."

In April an ICO team will use that data and other analyses to make recommendations, which the ICO steering committee will vet this spring.

"We really can overcome these challenges," Streeter said later. "They're not insurmountable."