By Tru Consulting
A finance staff member at a medical school needs to know one thing: who is teaching what next semester, and for how many hours. That answer should take 30 seconds to find.
Instead, it usually takes an email to the registrar, a cross-check against last year’s spreadsheet and a phone call to confirm the person listed still works in that department. By the time the answer arrives, it may already be out of date.
This is the reality for a lot of academic medical centers and large universities right now.
69%
In a recent poll during a Tru Consulting webinar,
of higher ed finance and planning leaders said they’re still tracking faculty effort in Excel or in some combination of disconnected systems.
Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine had a harder deadline than most. Their existing system was a university-licensed tool with a contract ending in June 2025. Whatever replaced it needed to be live before then, and it needed to handle a genuinely complicated dataset. That’s what makes what they built worth walking through.
The Deadline Forced a Real Decision, Not a Patch
MSU partnered with Tru to rebuild educational assignment tracking in Anaplan, migrating five years of historical data so trend reporting wouldn’t start from zero.
The complexity was real. Faculty at a community-based medical school don’t sit neatly in one department. A physician might be employed by one unit, credited to another for teaching, and split between the two for funding purposes. Some faculty are volunteers. Some are contracted. Some hold leadership roles that carry no assigned hours but still represent real contribution to the curriculum. None of that fits cleanly into a single spreadsheet column, and none of it could be waved away by the deadline.
What MSU and Tru built instead of a patch was a system where that complexity lives in the structure itself, not in someone’s memory of how it’s supposed to work.
Four Changes, Four Concrete Payoffs
Each piece of the rebuild solved a specific operational problem. Together, they’re the difference between a system people work around and a system people work inside.
Standardizing how assignments are defined. MSU built a single hierarchy across more than 830 individual assignments, each with consistent data elements: hours, sessions, planning method. The payoff is less time spent reconciling definitions between departments, which means faster, more consistent planning cycles.
Embedding automation into the data itself. Employee information now flows automatically from MSU’s HR system and enterprise data warehouse, and a data hub integration keeps Anaplan and the university’s Spartan Financial Navigator in sync. The payoff is less manual entry, fewer errors and faster cycle times, because nobody is retyping what already exists somewhere else.
Aligning workflows to who actually owns them. The Undergraduate Medical Education team builds the plan. Curricular teams update the actuals. Role-based security enforces that split automatically. The payoff is clear ownership, which removes the bottlenecks and conflicting updates that come from too many hands touching the same data.
Keeping history and plan-versus-actual side by side, on purpose. MSU retained full version control by academic year, with planned and actual tracked at both the employee and assignment level. The payoff isn’t just a cleaner audit trail. It’s better forecasting, because a plan is only useful if you can see how it compared to what really happened.
The Numbers Only Matter Because of What They Represent
MSU went from project kickoff to go-live in fewer than seven weeks. They’ve now completed two full planning cycles, and the most recent one closed with no issues reported.
The scale is real: more than 60,000 academic hours assigned annually, equating to more than 36 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions, across 378 employees in the first year alone. Those numbers used to live in fragments, reconstructed by hand whenever someone needed a full picture. Now they exist in one place, and the data feeds Power BI directly for anyone who needs the metrics without logging into the planning tool at all.
The outcome worth pausing on isn’t the hours or the FTE count. It’s that faculty are now pulling this data themselves for promotion and tenure review, because it’s more granular than what their academic information systems capture at the course level. A system built to solve an administrative deadline is now informing career decisions. That’s what happens when data quality becomes a byproduct of good design, rather than a separate project.
The Question Worth Asking
Faculty effort tracking is rarely anyone’s top priority until a licensing contract ends, a dean asks a question nobody can answer cleanly, or an accreditation review needs a number that takes three weeks to assemble by hand.
MSU’s answer wasn’t just a new tool. It was connecting the people doing the work, the planning process that governs it and the resources being tracked into one place instead of three.
Where in your institution are people, planning and resources still disconnected?
About Tru Consulting
Tru Consulting is a strategic planning modernization partner focused exclusively on higher education, academic medical centers, and public sector organizations. Our team helps institutions build connected planning environments that improve visibility, reduce manual effort, and support better decisions. This post is adapted from a Tru workshop session hosted by Libby Deibler, Managing Partner at Tru Consulting and led by Kris Stroud, Strategic Partnerships Initiatives Manager at Michigan State University.
You can watch the webinar on demand below:
