Workflow Wizardry

Kathryn Behling’s background is in foreign languages. Martin Rosales has a master’s degree in higher education administration and is working toward his doctorate. Matthew Priest was once a math teacher and previously worked at the U.S. Department of State as a consular officer. Tyler Morkin once taught English as a second language. None of these international student and scholar services (ISSS) specialists have a technology background. However, they—and many others—have leveraged commonly available tools to streamline the ways in which their offices work. The end result: improved relationships with students and other offices on campus.

Some international offices have worked with information technology (IT) departments to create sophisticated workflow solutions. At Yale University, for example, ISSS staff worked closely with IT to create a custom application for visa processing. But streamlining workflows doesn’t have to require the deep technical knowledge held by IT colleagues. What’s more important, those interviewed for this article agree, is to first think about existing processes and how they can be improved and then examine what resources are available to automate and streamline repetitive tasks.

“The heaviest lift is at the beginning, but once it’s set up, you can continue to refine and make improvements,” says Priest, an international student and scholar adviser at the University of Michigan.

From Paper to Process Automation

At a previous institution in the mid-2010s, Rosales was faced with the task of managing immigration records for all international students in a completely paper-based office. He quickly created a Google Form to check in students at the front desk, allowing the office to collect information about each student and their needs and assign them to the appropriate staffer.

“It came out of necessity,” says Rosales, now assistant director of global partnerships and initiatives at Texas A&M University.

For Behling, a data and compliance analyst at North Carolina State University, the journey into workflow optimization began with an integration that no longer worked. “I was given one of these tools and told to figure out what was broken,” she says. “I had zero coding knowledge.”

“The heaviest lift is at the beginning, but once it’s set up, you can continue to refine and make improvements.” —Matthew Priest

Working with Google Apps Script, a cloud-based JavaScript platform that enables automation and integration, Behling linked a Google Form used for scheduling appointments with the school’s GlobalHome case management platform. This connection allowed ISSS staff to filter out responses from students who may not need to schedule an appointment, such as those who had already been issued Social Security numbers and were seeking clearance to work.

If staff had to meet with every student who didn’t need the additional paperwork, it would have been “an hour of our front desk’s time wasted,” Behling says.

Behling has since developed similar workflows to track secondary approvals across other departments, including career development and export controls offices. Instead of having to individually review a hundred or more emails at a time, approvers in those departments receive a spreadsheet of all requests automatically generated by a Google Apps Script tool, which approvers can use to click links to each case in GlobalHome. Once each case is approved, the student’s name is removed from the active tab of the spreadsheet and archived. “That makes our working relationships with those two offices much smoother,” she says.

In similar fashion, as the University of Michigan’s SEVIS coordinator, Morkin has leveraged Microsoft’s cloud-based Power Automate platform to automatically download and sort information from SEVIS in order to automate tasks like tracking daily shifts in immigration status and sending warning emails when necessary—for example, if a student becomes underenrolled.

“That makes our working relationships with those two offices much smoother.” —Kathryn Behling

While Microsoft Power Automate and Google Apps Script require some programming ability, Google Forms and similar tools need less technical knowledge. For Priest, a simple application called AutoHotkey, which allows users to customize keystrokes to run macros and other simple commands on their computers, was all it took to start automating repetitive tasks, such as populating the right fields with names, titles, and comments on paperwork like I-20s and extension requests.

While these automations “save seconds, those seconds add up to minutes,” he says. And during unexpected crunch periods, like when Priest’s office had to extend 1,200 I-20s when the term calendar changed, those minutes can also add up to hours. “It’s hard to quantify, but no one likes responding to unnecessary emails,” he says.

Four Steps to Automation

Developing even the simplest automations can take time and patience, but the longer-term payoff is worth it. “There’s a lot of legwork… and figuring it out,” Rosales says. Among the strategies recommended by the experts featured in this article:

1. Think through the problem before touching any tool.

“Identify something you can do better,” Rosales says. “You need to understand what’s working and what’s not working, whether you are following industry standards [or looking at] what others are doing.”

One way of pinpointing tasks ripe for automation is considering common friction points in the office. “I think about things that are particularly frustrating for me or for students,” Morkin says. For example, mass email reminder blasts were routinely eliciting confused responses from students who didn’t need a reminder because they had already completed the required task, he says. Now, automations can filter out those students and remove them from the email distribution list, saving everyone time. “Their responses frustrated me—they didn’t need to read that email, and we didn’t need to send it,” he says. “There’s a gap somewhere we can identify and look at how we can tweak things to patch that hole.”

“You need to understand what’s working and what’s not working, whether you are following industry standards [or looking at] what others are doing.” —Martin Rosales

Automation is particularly powerful for repetitive tasks or ones in which greater consistency is needed. But it’s also important to gauge whether others in the office—and counterparts elsewhere, in the case of processes that touch other departments or units—are prepared to change daily tasks.

“If you’re not ready to examine changes in what you do, you’re not ready for [new] workflows—full stop,” Rosales says. “That’s the first thing you need to address.”

And don’t overlook the lowest-tech approach of all: eliminating an existing workflow if it’s no longer needed, such as duplicative requests to upload student visas, Morkin adds.

“A lot of it comes down to what we’re trying to do overall in the office,” Behling says. “We want[ed] alternatives, and we didn’t want to pay for a new tool if we could do it ourselves, so we did it.”

2. Understand the resources available to solve the problem.

The next step is to understand the tools available on your campus to help automate existing workflows. For example, many institutions have sitewide agreements with Microsoft and Google, which may provide access to automation tools like Power Automate and Apps Script, respectively. Simpler tools, such as Google Forms, may be free to all. Other enterprise platforms, such as Salesforce and Qualtrics, include low- or no-code automation tools, while third-party integration services, such as Zapier, may represent a relatively low-cost alternative to intensive in-house customization. And as they mature, AI tools will also provide new opportunities to simplify workflows beyond serving as chatbots to field commonly asked questions.

These tools require differing levels of technical experience, but there’s often a wealth of information available online, ranging from tutorials provided by the tool’s developers to random YouTube explainers. Behling ultimately took a JavaScript class at her institution to help sharpen her skills with Google Apps Script, but Google’s self-paced courses got her started with the tool’s complex scripting environment. Others have collaborated with peers in IT and other departments to understand the tools available to them and get going.

“I enjoy the tweaking and the tinkering. If that frustrates you, it’s probably going to be hard to sink your teeth into it.” —Tyler Morkin

And, of course, the most important resource is the person trying to develop workflow automations. “I enjoy the tweaking and the tinkering,” Morkin says. “If that frustrates you, it’s probably going to be hard to sink your teeth into it.” Consider who in the office might be interested in exploring automation—from full-time staffers to a student employee who is a computer science major.

3. Keep trying—and refining.

Start slowly with simple processes, ideally with an example of previous automation or script that helped solve a similar problem within your office or institution. “You can start from scratch and learn, but if you can get an example, start there,” Priest says.

And regardless of the complexity of a solution, thorough testing before an automation is unleashed is a must. “The number of times I’ve tested things and found they are breaking everything else is entirely too common,” Behling says.

In general, shoot for the simplest solutions possible. “There are things I could implement today that are very complicated, but I don’t, because if I did, it would add confusion and complexity,” Rosales says. “Don’t go through all these steps if it doesn’t make any sense.”

4. Get creative.

Automation can help with more than day-to-day tasks, particularly when it involves the collection and sorting of data in new ways. For example, at Texas A&M, the international office flowed data collected from student evaluations of the office into data presentation software—Tableau and Power BI are two common such platforms—to create a visual presentation demonstrating the need for as many as 11 additional staff members.

“Did we get all 11? We got four,” Rosales says. Nonetheless, it’s an example of how harnessing technology can literally serve as a force multiplier in international offices.  •