Our thoughts

Last week’s budget didn’t include the increase in tuition fees that Higher Education institutions were hoping for. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot in the budget for the HE sector and certainly no significant increase in funding. Today’s news that tuition fees will in fact rise by about 3.1% will allay some of the concern that Universities have about funding, but doesn’t meet the amounts Universities UK called for earlier in the year.

The big impact of the budget on HE looks set to be the same thing organisations in other sectors are talking about: the increase in employer National Insurance contributions. This will make universities’ pay bill bigger. In fact, the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA) has said that they estimate the change to add about £372 million to the HE sector’s staff costs – around a 2.1% increase.

So, without a significant increase in money coming in, and with more money going out, HE institutions find themselves looking for ways to reduce costs without reducing the services they offer. This means finding ways of doing things better with the same – or fewer – resources. As the Education Secretary said in her speech today: a renewed drive for efficiency.

This isn’t a new concept, of course. Universities have been embracing principles like Lean and continuous improvement for years, and great progress has been made in making colleagues –  especially in professional services circles – aware of the importance and benefits of these approaches. Just take a look at events like UKEduCamp or the Lean HE conference (held in Cambridge this year!): these show there’s a bustling community of people working on sector-specific ways to reduce waste and work better.

So what’s it like to fight that good fight in the HE context? To push for change, often gradual and incremental, when everyone is flat-out busy with business as usual (BAU) and on that mad spinning hamster wheel of the three academic terms and the bits in between when everyone tries to balance taking some leave with actually getting some improvement work done?

It’s tough. It’s difficult to be heard when everyone is so busy. People are already working hard, and their jobs are demanding and complex and need them to be paying attention. Those manual steps and those triple-checks and those offline spreadsheets they have to maintain to compensate for lack of tooling – they already fill up their days. People don’t have a lot of time or spare effort to put into trying out the improvement idea you (or they) have come up with.

So you need to convince them. You might be tempted to start with pain points, because they’re abundant and they’re evocative. But people already know the pain points: they’re living them! Painful processes and HE professional services sort of go hand in hand – at least, that’s how it can feel.

You reach for another way to get your point across. How about the idea that the change will bring about savings – either in time, effort or money? That’s good – we need to save time and money. But how much time and how much money? This, in my experience, is where one of the true pains of the BAU hamster wheel comes into force: you can’t honestly say how much time will be saved, because you often don’t have any baselines. You don’t have the data to make a decent estimate and that means you can’t quantify the potential improvement. Recording data and establishing baselines takes time and effort, and we’ve already established that people don’t have that time and can’t spare that effort.

I don’t think there’s any way around it: we just need to get better at measuring and establishing baselines. Without them, estimating potential savings, or modelling how a change to a process might make an impact is nothing more than a finger in the air. A finger in the air isn’t a compelling case. It doesn’t instil confidence or loosen purse strings. 

It’s not easy, though. HE isn’t manufacturing. People don’t tend to think in terms of units and task time and productivity. In fact, these sorts of metrics in an HE context can be alienating.  From personal experience, applying measures like these to some of the work done in HE would feel almost insulting. It’d cheapen the work that adds uncountable value. Thinking back on the types of things I did during my time in HE, I cringe at the thought of them being reduced to numbers. It’s difficult to imagine using a stopwatch to measure how long it took to give advice on a dissertation extension to a tearful student, or picture an auditor counting emails as I pieced together a complicated grant for a postgraduate who truly deserved it.

We have to focus on measuring things that make sense to measure, and do that well. I can hear one of my mentors talking about it now: how we should focus on gathering data on the things that matter and not on data for data’s sake: “It’s ‘measure what you treasure’, not ‘treasure what you measure’”, she’d say.

If we make the commitment to grasp the nettle and collect data about sensible things, like how long it takes to process a dissertation submission, or draft and issue an employment contract, we can start making the data work for us. We can start to make those evidence-based decisions with more confidence. We can demonstrate benefits and, where applicable, we can quantify (sharp intake of breath) ‘return on investment’. 

But there’s an important step that needs to happen first: we need to put the data somewhere where it’s useful and usable. We can’t keep putting effort into sporadic measurement only to bury that information into offline spreadsheets, locked away in a dark appendix of a business case or report, never to be seen again.

One way of doing this is by using powerful, purpose-built tools that help us map data points right into your process maps. The more effort we put into this sort of documentation, the more reward we can get.

Modelling like this lets us get an idea of how much time could be saved by combining a particular step in a process, or how many people would be impacted if a particular task was automated. Imagine having those numbers to hand and being able to make an evidenced-based argument when trying to convince people to try out a process change.

Just as important, having good baselines, and having them in a tool that makes it easy for us to surface the information, would allow us to advocate against reducing resources if needed: we could evidence and quantify the negative impact on the standard of a given service if resource was moved out of a particular team.

By committing to this kind of data-driven transformation, Universities could continue to rev-up their efforts to get rid of the waste in their processes, without harming the quality of their services. They’d be able to use their own data to hone-in on the changes that would make things work better, reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, and allow staff to invest their energy in high-value work that’s aligned with the core purpose of professional services: supporting and enabling teaching, learning and research.

Now, I care about this topic because I know that Universities have a lot of waste in their processes and I’ve felt the pain that waste causes. I also know what it’s like to dive into the detail of a process, map it out with the people who know it best, pinpoint the bottlenecks and the waste, and work together to figure out how to make things better. I know that feeling of momentum and enthusiasm and the jarring frustration that comes from realising that we just don’t have the data to be able to back our ideas up or demonstrate that they worked.

At Herd, we’ve learned from this kind of experience. We’ve brought together people who’ve faced these challenges in HE, Central Government, Local Authorities and elsewhere. We know how to capture processes and meaningful baseline data and do it in a way that’s not burdensome for those people trapped in BAU work. What’s more, we know how to get the most from the best tools: tools that allow us to store and display that baseline data right there in the process maps, meaning we can use it for modelling scenarios, backing-up business cases and demonstrating value and benefits.

Does any of this ring a bell? Are you on the same hamster wheel? Get in touch with us if you’re interested in working with us. We’d love to find out more and explore how we can help. Ping us a message over LinkedIn or get in touch.

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🖊️ Authored by: Dan Ford, Senior Consultant Business Analyst at Herd Consulting

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