It’s been a homecoming of sorts for Jan Gouveia, University of Hawaii vice president for administration.

UH-Manoa is where she earned her undergraduate degree in political science and years later, returned to fill several posts, including assistant general counsel for the UH system, after earning her master’s degree in business administration and law degree from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.

Over the past decade, her career has meandered in and out of the public and private sectors — and she is leveraging all she has learned to tackle some of the most daunting issues facing the UH system. Among them: attacking a $503 million backlog in deferred maintenance and repairs, and ensuring that UH is compliant under Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act.

For Gouveia, maintaining the status quo at UH was never part of the equation — and in fact, made sure that wasn’t UH President David Lassner’s expectation when she took the job 18 months ago to oversee systemwide operation programs in procurement, real property, risk management, capital improvements, human resources and communications.

Action, she said, speaks loudest. This week, she is overseeing the rollout of a centralized database of capital improvement projects. She has been streamlining the way those projects are managed. And she has helped establish the Office of Institutional Equity and Office of Sustainability.

Gouveia moved to UH from Hawaiian Airlines, where had she served on its strategy and business transformation group.

“I got to join the team and really had my eyes opened to how private business can move incredibly quick and learned a ton when I was there,” she said.

After her first four years with UH, she became chief legal counsel for the Honolulu Board of Water Supply where she learned the ins and outs of construction projects; held a brief stint at Waimana Enterprises; then served in Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s administration as deputy director in the Transportation Department and Department of Accounting and General Services.

“I didn’t donate a penny, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t wave a sign — nothing,” Gouveia joked about her appointment to Abercrombie’s administration.

She lives in Palolo with her husband, Leonard, also an attorney, and their son, Bronson, a junior at ‘Iolani School. Their daughter, Sabrina, is a sophomore at Santa Clara University.

Question: You’ve been in this position for 18 months now. What was the draw?

Answer: My whole reason for being interested is … I needed to know that the leadership was looking forward to changing the way that the university functioned as a business, as an ongoing business entity.

That meant in my mind really being willing to reconsider the way we do all parts of our business, which ultimately goes to the core of this organization’s values and corporate culture.

So when you start looking at the areas that fell within this position — which was procurement, capital projects, risk management, human resources, communications, real property — that in and of itself puts whoever heads that up in this opportune position to make a difference one way or the other. The question in my mind was, was there leadership desire to, at the highest level — so that’s the board and the president (David Lassner) — be willing to be aggressive and progressive in the way that we conduct our business in those areas.

… Within my sphere of influence I kind of made it clear that I’m going to come in and it’s not going to be business as usual.

Q: What was the initial reaction?

A: There was kind of a lot of head-nodding, so quite honestly I had to come back and meet with the president a few times before I even had gotten my own comfort around, “Are they really serious or are they just saying the right thing?”

I know (Lassner) very well and we just had a very candid conversation that I may come in and ruffle feathers. I will do it as respectfully as I possibly can, it’s all professional. But people will not willingly participate and so they’re going to come to you. I need to know that you’re going to back me and he said, absolutely I will back you. … He’s actually been very true to his word.

Since then there’s been lots of other things that have been added to my plate. Right when I started, Title IX and VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) seemed to have had this longstanding undercurrent of the university really not being serious about it. I think the president, whose background is not in that, absolutely made it his priority, but didn’t really have the wherewithal, that tool kit, to actually prove to the world that it really was serious for him. He did ask me to spearhead whatever it took to elevate the prioritization around Title IX compliance and VAWA awareness. That, we did do.

Q: Where are you at this point?

A: We have an Office of Institutional Equity that has been established. It’s a brand new office in the system. For anybody that’s been involved in government, they’ll know that to establish an office and even fill positions takes, sometimes, years. We were able to do it in about three months.

Jen Rose is its director. … The policy has been established. … Now there’s a staff of three and we’ve done a ton of training. … We got a website up and running and she fields quite a bit of calls daily from all campuses, and so really, the objective for the near term is to develop a standard knowledge base that is across the board, all campuses, so that regardless of what campus you go to, you’re getting the same level of service and competency.

Q: Let’s move to deferred maintenance — the half a billion dollars worth. Could you tell me about some of your initiatives?

A: So I think there are two elements to it.

One is the operational/tactical side of how do we do the business of executing capital projects better?

Along that line, one of the first things I noticed when I started working here was a fairly decentralized kind of project-tracking mechanism. So every time we needed to get information about a project, first of all, who is the project engineer? Look up their number in the directory, give them a call and find out what’s going on. Without really having a sense of the universe of projects that are out there, there’s really nothing to base decision-making on and prioritization. We procured an e-Builder, a project management or construction management software system. Our kickoff for the project has already begun. The vendor will be on site (this week). We are in the middle of implementing it and rolling it out to all of our campuses.

… Another one of the areas that was identified was kind of on the contracting side of things. The way the organization was structured was: The project engineer took a project from beginning to the end, which makes a lot of sense, except these people are architects and engineers. They went to school and got licensed to be an architect and engineer. They did not go to school to become the one that puts together the contract, processes the invoices and … pushes it through procurement. … Imposing all these other requirements on the project engineer, we put them in a situation where it wasn’t their strength. That’s a risk.

Under a new organizational model, engineers and architects will focus on their technical area of expertise and this whole thing around contract administration and project administration, we’ll pick up administrators for that. That is, organizationally, what we’re trying to build now, the administrative side of the house.

Q: Are you making strategic changes?

A: The current strategy that has been in place for as long as I can tell has been this very routine notion of get money, fix what’s broken, do the preventive maintenance, and what it does is maintain the status quo of a building.

In the first maybe 40 years of a facilty’s useful life it kind of makes sense, but then at some point in time the useful life is gone. …

So the shift is going to move away from a more myopic view of what’s broken, let’s fix it, to let’s modernize, bring modern learning environments to our campuses that take advantage of technology, that appreciate the way adult learners think, which is a lot different than younger people. It’s all about interactive, dynamic learning environments …

Let’s come together from a facilities and an academic standpoint and say, hey look, if we had to rethink the way that we could use this facility, what would it be? That requires a lot closer coordination with the academic programs. The difficult conversations are going to be around the fact that we have limited funding, so that’s going to mean programs that used to be able to declare their own space … may have to be open to the possibility of sharing space.

Q: How are you approaching change orders on projects and the length of time they take to process?

A: Change orders have been on my radar basically from Day One. We have a fairly onerous change-order process that’s driven primarily by federal procurement requirements. But when we don’t use federal funds, we do have an opportunity to be less stringent on our internal procedures. So we will be updating the policies to reflect change-order processes that are more akin to how all of our other state agencies (work) … that ultimately gives a lot more responsibility to the project manager and the branch chief or the department head in the field. And that way all the administrative reviews that happen are eliminated. … So there is training involved, … leveling out expectations, giving them the resources to be able to execute responsibly. … That should be in place by the end of the year.

Q: What’s a suitable timeline for processing a change order? Every project is different, but what would you like to see?

A: Once it’s an official change order, it should not take more than two to three weeks to process. …

In my first few months here, there were these change orders coming through that were years old. So immediately I asked people to take care of their outstanding change orders and be timely about processing them. So there absolutely has been a noticeable increase in more timely change orders. I don’t get them in years anymore. Now it’s within a 12-month period.

Q: Your position now includes overseeing some functions of the Manoa campus as well as the UH system. With that change are you consolidating or trying to move folks around so there’s no duplication? How is that going to work?

A: That’s a very good question and I don’t yet have the answer to that. The great thing is that the president and the regents recognize that it is a complicated matter that affects people’s lives. The expectation is for me to proceed responsibly and respectfully, which I intend to do. At a high level there have been expectations placed on this institution, and more specificlly, the president, to find ways where organizationally we can … conduct business in a more efficient manner. Those are in the areas of human resources, communications, research and how we can organizationally at least create an environment that is more optimum than the current state.

Q: Do you sense that people are uncomfortable with all this movement?

A: There’s, I think, unanimous agreement that the current state could be improved. So it’s just a question of how. We had to take over Manoa facilities as of Jan. 1. And they’ve been super. That entire OPF group, Office of Planning and Facilities, they’ve been very receptive to the potential for what this can mean for their campus and their day-to-day worklife.

Q: How confident are you about this latest funding plan to tackle deferred maintenance? Are you hopeful?

A: I am hopeful. I actually am not counting on anything. I want to be prepared to deal with the worst-case scenario. And my philosophy is, just by being prepared and investing the effort to put us in the place to run with whatever we get, I hope that there’s some recognition of that. …

I think in the one year we have been here, the president’s VP team, … there has been this holistic change under the president. … We’re all invested in this and we have all made a commitment to each other to doing what it takes to make this work, so all I can hope is that level of commitment is seen as something legitimate by the Legislature. The only way I know how to do that is just to do it through action. … Every dollar more that we get is deeply appreciated … I feel it’s my job to make sure that that dollar is not only not wasted, but used for its maximum value.