Mike Iadanza, program manager for UC Davis’ Shared Services Implementation Team, will forever remember something that his boss used to say at the College Board.

Iadanza assisted the not-for-profit organization in its 2005 introduction of an essay to the SAT exam. At the time, Gaspon Caperton, the former two-term governor of West Virginia, served as the College Board president, and he retains that position today.

“In dealing with this big change at the College Board, he would always ask, ‘What’s the best thing for the kids?’ ‘What’s the right thing for the kids?’”

Iadanza carries that philosophy with him in his assignment at UC Davis, where he is the point man for the establishment of the campus’s first multiunit shared service center — which represents a big change in the way UC Davis does business.

“To me, building a shared service center for this organization is really about being in service to the students and faculty.

“The more money we can save by doing things efficiently, the more we can do for them. That’s why I took this job.”

‘A solid first step’

He came on board Jan. 10 on a two-year contract, and members of the Shared Services Governance Committee are impressed with his work so far.

“Mike has really hit the ground running and has made excellent progress within just a few weeks,” said Dave Shelby, assistant vice provost in Information and Educational Technology. “He is clearly committed to working with all levels of the campus IT community to ensure he fully understands our ‘current state,’ which will serve us all very well as we better define our ‘future state.’”

Emily Galindo, who leads Student Housing as an associate vice chancellor in Student Affairs, described Iadanza as “a solid first step” in the campus’s shared service center project.

“My meetings and observations of Mike indicate a person who is not only knowledgeable of transition processes but someone who is keenly aware of the challenges that we are all facing in doing work differently,” said Galindo, who, like Shelby, is a member of the Shared Services Governance Committee.

“I believe his experience will serve us well as we move forward,” Galindo said.

A future Aggie?

A few years before Iadanza went to work for the College Board, he had become a father at the age of 45. Little did he know at the time, but his son, David, would end up living in California, and Iadanza, too, would eventually move from the Northeast to Elk Grove, where he shares custody of his son.

And, now, when Iadanza talks about doing more for UC Davis students, he realizes that his own son (10 years old and a straight-A student) may one day be among them.

“Every time I walk around here, and see the students, I say to myself: He’s somebody’s son or she’s somebody’s daughter, or somebody’s niece or nephew,” Iadanza said. “To me, they are all like my son.”

Iadanza earned two degrees at St. John’s University in his native New York: a Bachelor of Science in finance (with a minor in theology) and a Master’s of Business Administration.

He has extensive experience in implementing shared service centers in large, complex environments — at companies like Coca-Cola and MetLife Insurance.

He has worked with industry leaders, such as the consulting firms McKinsey & Company and Ernst & Young, as well as Fortune 500 clients and smaller companies, to implement change within organizations, and has served as project manager for the implementation of multiple, sophisticated technology systems in the areas of finance and HR.

And while his son holds a brown belt in karate, Iadanza has a master black belt from Villanova University — in Six Sigma, a business management strategy aimed at identifying and removing defects from processes, and thereby cutting down on the amount of work that must be redone.

“In my opinion, the most efficiency gains are in processes, not technology,” Iadanza said.

Have any whitewall tires?

With a career like his, you can expect to hear some stories — and he enjoys telling them. Like the time he did some consulting work for a tire manufacturer.

“At the last stop on the production line, I saw them wrapping each tire in white material, like Styrofoam. So I asked why, and they told me it was for the whitewall tires, to keep the paint from coming off on other tires.”

Later that day, as he walked through the parking lot, “I started to notice that there weren’t any whitewall tires. I checked hundreds of cars in the lot, and I didn’t see one whitewall.”

So he went back inside the plant and asked if whitewalls had gone out of style in that particular region of the country. No, it was a broader trend, so much so that the manufacturer actually turned out very few runs of whitewall tires.

Yet, every tire — whitewall or not — received a white wrapper to keep the paint from getting onto other tires.

“If that’s the only reason you’re doing it, why do it?” Iadanza asked.

It was a quick thing to fix, he said, “all because someone looked at it with a different set of eyes.”

Confidence all the way around

For UC Davis’ shared service center, he is observing and participating in project team meetings, sometimes four or five a week as the teams face an April 15 deadline to complete one of their first tasks: analyzing all of the processes in four functional areas (finance, payroll, human resources and informational technology) within the center’s five participating units: Administrative and Resource Management, the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost, Information and Educational Technology, Student Affairs, and University Relations.

The project teams came together for the first time Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, for orientation and to start work — and to meet Iadanza, who left at least one participant confident that the project is in good hands.

Iadanza is confident, too, if for no other reason than “the individual brilliance of the people who are on the project teams.” They are among the people who are doing the work now, at the ground level, and they are being asked, quite simply: “If you could change something, how would you change it?”

Like the time he worked at a major New York brokerage with a cumbersome system of paying consultants. Here is how it worked: a consultant would fill out a timesheet, the brokerage would approve it and send it to the consulting company, and the company would create an invoice and send it to the brokerage.

A 21-year-old junior consultant suggested the elimination of the invoice Instead, the consultant’s timesheet stayed with the brokerage, which used the timesheet to create an accounts payable record — and then cut a check based on the agreed-upon payment schedule.

“The only thing I didn’t like about this, was that I didn’t think of it myself,” Iadanza said.

“It basically comes down to common sense.”

‘If we can fund one more program …’

All this common sense is expected to save UC Davis $25 million from 2010-11 through 2015-16, followed by annual savings of $10 million thereafter.

Along with this will come job losses: 120 to 170 full-time equivalent positions in finance, payroll, human resources and information technology. But, as painful as that will be, Iadanza stressed again why UC Davis is engaged in this process.

“If we can fund one more student program, if we can fund one more research project, or find better ways to assist the faculty in their work, then we will have been successful,” he said. “That’s really the purpose of what we’re doing here.”

He is quick to point out that UC Davis’ business processes are what may need improving — not the people working here. “I don’t ever remember concluding, anywhere I have worked, that we didn’t have the right staff,” he said.

“We are doing things the way we do them now, because that’s the way they have always been done,” he said. “Now we are trying to do things differently.”

Which leads him to another story, this one dealing with Fantastik household cleaner. Iadanza did not work for the product’s maker, but he was a consumer.

He had seen Fantastik in the store one day for $4 less than his preferred brand, Spic and Span. So he took the deal — despite thinking, Who do these people think they are, calling their product Fantastik?

A while later, he noticed a “new and improved” Fantastik on store shelves. “And I asked myself, ‘If you’re ‘Fantastik’ to begin with, why do you need improvement?’”

The moral of the story: “Even if you’re fantastic, you can improve.”

And, as proud as we already are of UC Davis, its faculty, staff and students, “we can be even more proud, we can be more fantastic,” by saving money with the shared service center, and putting the savings into the university’s core mission.