Roberts cautions that the training period is the time to make it clear what the expectations will be in terms of time, extra work, and commitment. Roberts recommends that team participants be told up front about the membership requirements. After people have agreed to join a team and begin to work on a process, their enthusiasm, sense of purpose, and mushrooming camaraderie are hard to contain. It takes a while for a team to go through the development stages of forming, storming, and norming to reach the performing level. But once they've attained that capacity, there's no limit to what can be accomplished.
Administrative processes lend themselves quite naturally to study.
Academic processes, on the other hand, touch on sensitive issues, such as instructor effectiveness or academic freedom, and are inherently more difficult to measure. Only mature, skilled teams, like the DCCC groups, should work on academic processes. Figure 1 shows the administrative processes the three institutions have studied. Several of the above processes have been fully studied and the results have positively impacted the budget in each case. Installing a voice message system to respond to routine inquiries about the GED program saved the Assessment Center staff from answering 175 calls monthly.