Your Productivity Toolbox: Maximizing Your Efficiency in Your Workplace

THE APAC Professional Development subcommittee on Sept. 30 hosted a workshop entitled, “Your Productivity Toolbox: Maximizing Your Efficiency in Your Workplace.”

Julie Kong.

Kimberly Mayfield.

USING A lean principle learned as students in the UIC Lean Six Sigma program, APAC Professional Development co-chairs from the School of Public Health, Julie Kong, Director of Research Services, and Kimberly Mayfield, Director of Finance and Administration, talked about the use of the “5 Why Tree” as a strategy for teams in figuring out the “root cause” of a problem.  This strategy recommends asking “why” at least five times to identify underlying causes of problems that may appear easy to solve.  After discussing the basic principles, workshop participants tested the principle in small groups and reported their findings back to the group.

Christine Rapp.

THE SECOND half of the workshop was presented by Christine Rapp, a dual MBA/MPH candidate with over ten years of Excel experience. Her projects have used Excel to examine data sets with over 200,000 entries and create multiple levels of reports from these data sets. She explained step-by-step how to create pivot tables from scratch, and at a moment’s notice, and specialty reports by moving and adding fields to reflect the needed information. Participants at the end of the session remarked that the workshop was very useful. A webinar of Christine’s pivot table presentation is available at: https://sites.google.com/site/uicapac/careers/professional-skills or via the UIC APAC website under Careers > Professional Skills.