Changing rooms

My work takes me a lot to two sorts of places – universities and budget hotels. There’s a lot the latter can learn from the former.

We had guests last weekend (bear with me – I’ll show relevance, as Perry Mason used to say) which meant a fair amount of quilt-cover changing. Or quilt wrestling – it isn’t a quick and easy job. But I saw something in one of the UK’s premier budget hotel company’s rooms which gave me pause for thought. Their quilt covers have two design features unlike those we use at home.

One end is simply open – no press-studs, no buttons, no toggles. It’s just a big bag for the quilt. And at the other end (and this is sheer genius, I think), the seam is left open for about six inches, just where it meets the top, and just where your hands can go to make changing the quilt cover a really easy job.

More useful knowledge about quilts

What’s happening here is that the hotel has thought about what you need in a quilt. Clearly, as the guest, I wanted clean and warm. Call me picky, but they’re non-negotiables when it comes to quilts as far as I’m concerned. You also want, perhaps, a quilt that goes with the rest of the room décor –it makes the place seem more stylish. Not an essential, but a nice to have. So that’s some big ticks as far as the guest experience goes: warm, clean, stylish.

From the hotel management’s point of view, they also want rooms to be cleaned quickly: fewer staff keeps the costs down, and it’s a very competitive market. So, they’ve clearly looked at what takes time in servicing a room, and worked out how to make it a bit quicker. It doesn’t detract from the guest experience (it’s a budget hotel: I’ve already done some trade-offs in my head, and know that I’m not staying in a four-star place). It helps them deliver the value which their guests want. And it makes the cleaner’s job easier, which is also good.

Taking a step backwards, what the hotel have done is think very clearly and carefully about what their value proposition is – why people stay in the hotels. And that’s something like a decent room at a good price. So they know that they need to meet (and exceed) basic expectations; but they also know that they need to keep the cost down: frills are undesirable.

And then they’ve clearly involved their staff in thinking about how to make it better – I’ll bet you that the ideas for the quilt changing improvements didn’t come from management sitting round a table, but from the people who clean the rooms taking part in a lean process review.

So how does this affect universities?

Well, all universities are engaged to some extent in price competition, some more clearly than others. What value is delivered to the student for their fees? Of course, the main value comes in the learning and the recognition of success through a degree award; but there’s also a value in the experience (or why would universities be building better halls of residence, and 4G sports pitches and the like?). By identifying what the value proposition is; by understanding what the student expects as a minimum and what the delighters are; and by thinking about how to deliver this as efficiently as possible, universities put themselves in the best position to attract students and have the capacity to invest in academic activity.

It isn’t comfortable language for a university, but if done properly it can help universities be better for their students without losing their soul. We might need a new language (marketing jargon goes down very badly in an academic environment) but the practice will remain valuable.

Counting them out and counting them back in again

One of my current clients is preparing for a graduation ceremony, which got me thinking. It’s been my view for some time now that many features of academic administration in universities can be explained by graduation: that is, they all work towards the task of making sure that the right student walks across stage with the right name called out to get the right degree certificate, and dressed in the right robes for a good photo.

Two proud graduates ...

Let’s take this in parts.

Firstly, the right student. So that’s about recruitment and admissions, that’s about enrolment, module selection and assessment, and that’s about keeping tags through a student record system on who a person is and whether they’ve passed the exams.

The right name called out. Well, that is also about a student record system, but it’s about knowing the student – which name do they actually use; how do you pronounce it; how do you make sure that the person reading the name out sounds like they’ve actually heard of them and aren’t surprised to see them there. So it ties in with things done to make sure that a student actually feels at home in the university and that someone knows them. Often the departmental office...

The right degree certificate. This ties into programme approval; any professional or statutory accreditation; making sure that the programme and the modules are all set up on the record system so that the transcript is easy to produce; and making sure that the credentials of the degree are all correct. Although a degree is really about the education, the validity of the certificate and transcript are really important in the instrumental uses of an education which students do care about.

The right gown and photo. This is about making the day memorable, so that the student leaves with fond memories; so that their family and friends get a good impression; so that there’s a tangible reminder to show proud grandparents; and so that the student (no, the graduate!) feels a lasting connection, and will stay in touch. With the alumni office. So that they might come back to give talks about their career, mentor current students, give money, leave legacies, and also say good things about the university whenever they get the chance.

I think graduations are great, as they’re one of the few days when everybody in the room is glad to be there. They can be wonderfully uplifting, with sudden displays of love and happiness and all manner of human frailty revealed. They are also, more prosaically, a significant milestone in the journey of a student.

And perhaps that’s the point I’m really getting at here: all of the different processes and functions in a university add together to make a student journey, which is a big part of their life story. It’s pretty important stuff, and seeing and recognising the joins and the connections makes it a better journey. So go to graduation and enjoy it; help out in marshalling the procession. But also think about all the steps necessary to get the right student the right degree with the right name read out and the right photo. And think what could be done to make it better.

Operational effectiveness

Any manager will at some point have worried about achieving reliability and efficiency in delivering a service. There’s a powerful combination of two established management tools which can help you.

The first tool is to use Standard Operating Procedures – SOPs. This isn't (just) an instruction manual for how to do something. It’s also a set of habits which keeps that recipe card current. Here’s how.

Document the procedure – and have it done by those who actually operate it. SOPs are common in laboratories and in manufacturing processes – here's guidance from the US EPA which includes examples – but they also apply to administrative processes, and particularly those which use complex databases or other IT systems. SOPs should articulate the critical steps; and identify any choices that the operator has to make, and the parameters for those choices. They should also not be so long that they become unusable.

Have the procedure reviewed and signed off by a senior member of staff, not involved in its drafting – the head of section or, if it's a small team, their manager. This is so that the process has formal authority as well as the expert authority that comes from the knowledge of its authors. It also means that any organisational or resourcing issues have to be addressed. And finally, it shows that the SOP is serious: make the sign-off process a real hurdle, and people will see that it matters.

Include in the document the reasons for the steps. Tell people why something matters and they are more likely to do it. Robert Cialdini reports a fantastic example of this in his book ‘Influence’, reporting on work done by Ellen Langer of Harvard University. Ellen Langer conducted experiments in which she asked people queuing to use a photocopier if she could push in.

• When the question was Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush? 94% let her go ahead of them
• When the question was Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? only 60% let her go ahead of them
• And when the question was Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? 93% let her go ahead of them

So when you give a reason – because – you get much more agreement. And note that the reason doesn't even have to be a good one – ‘because I'm in a rush’ and ‘because I have to make some copies’ get pretty much the same response, but the second reason adds no extra information. Why stand in a photocopier queue if you don’t want to make copies? So use a because and people will more likely notice.

Train people in using the procedure. It doesn't have to be a full day's training session, but at least talk them through the procedure; let them ask questions; observe and coach if they're unsure.

Set a review date; stick to that date; and involve those who operate the procedure in the review. Keep the procedure current; make sure you take account of any other organisational or priority changes which might impact; and learn from the experience of operating the procedure.  What tips and wrinkles have the operators identified? What would they change to make it better?

So that’s the first tool – standard operating procedures.

The second tool comes from Lean thinking, and is both simple and devastatingly powerful. It’s about identifying the nature of the tasks to be done, and makes the following distinction.

• Runners are tasks that occur on a daily basis, and are of sufficient volume to justify having a specific process to deal with them
• Repeaters are tasks that occur on a regular basis, but not frequently, and are not part of the day-to-day business of the organisation
• Strangers are tasks that occur infrequently

Now apply this distinction to a standard operating procedure. Does a single procedure try to cope with too many different types of event? Are you dealing with repeaters and strangers when you could be focusing only on runners? This can lead to delays where questions get passed around the organisation, and bottlenecks are created in workflow. I've seen this happen in processes around the student journey, where one non-standard case delays processing a whole batch of students, resulting in disproportionate problems.

The trick is to design the bottlenecks out. Make the procedure work for one specific task. If there’s another task which occurs, have another procedure. You can’t make apple pie with a recipe for blancmange. And make sure that you have triage at an early stage: work out if a case has the right features to be dealt with by a given procedure. If it has, then process it. If it doesn't, then refer it elsewhere. Just like a hospital, making sure that the broken bones go to the fracture clinic, and the blocked ears go to ENT.

And there you have it. Think about runners, repeaters and strangers, to make sure that your procedures have the right scope and focus. And then write and use a standard operating procedure to improve quality and reliability.

Good luck!

Dealing with uncertainty

A really excellent blog post by Gavan Conlon on wonkhe got me thinking about uncertainty within the higher education sector. Gavan’s post was about the RAB charge for tuition fee loans, which turns out to be higher (at the moment) than had been forecast. But also about the longer term changes to the higher education sector which arise from the policy changes.

This is just one example of the uncertainties around UK higher education at the moment. Let’s name check a few of them:

• Will international students keep coming to the UK given growing HE sectors elsewhere, and the current government’s hostile stance to migration?
• Will universities be able to regain steady patterns of student recruitment, or is the current system volatility set to continue?
• How much further will research funding be concentrated after REF, and will this make research unsustainable in some universities?
• What will the disruption to established patterns of higher education from the internet be? Is it MOOCs, or some other disruption yet to come?

There’s lots to be said about each of these, but that isn’t the point of what I want to say (not today, anyway!). The point is, that no-one who works in or cares about universities can act as if some basic assumptions won’t ever change. And this is a problem, because universities operate on a long cyclical model. For example, the students graduating in summer 2014 with an undergraduate degree, after 3 years of study, entered university in 2011, on promises made in a prospectus which was signed off in autumn 2009. Before Browne, before tuition fees, before austerity budgets.

So universities have to adapt to events, but they carry a heavy burden of commitments which make his hard, and which place burdens on staff who are very busy just delivering the day-to-day. (If universities are sometimes seen as slow to change, I think this is one of the reasons)

There’s no magic wand which will protect a university, or a team, or a person in a university, from change. But there are things you can do to help you prepare. Here’s three things you can do

1. Keep reading news.  And thinking about it.  By the time something is a headline it’s too late to avoid it, but by looking into what’s behind the headlines, and thinking a bit about what factors are driving developments, you can see further into the future.  The film Armageddon is a bit like this (honestly!)  If you nudge the asteroid far enough away from earth, it flies past harmlessly, but if you wait too long it’s gonna get you.

2. Scenario planning: imagine a few futures – in the five year horizon works well – and think about what would have to happen for that to come true, and what would be the implications if it did. So, for instance, suppose that in five years MOOCs are a dominant form of learning in higher education: a higher completion rate; reliable ways found to assess performance. If it were like this, who wouldn’t follow courses from Harvard and Yale? So universities would need to think about changing the teaching model, to focus perhaps on small group teaching as an adjunct to online lectures (welcome back, blended learning!) And to find ways to award credit for MOOCs. Will this happen? Personally, I doubt it, but if you were, for instance, responsible for quality assurance processes in a university, you might want to look at your APL rules to see how much use they would be in this scenario.

3. Keep yourself lean: I don’t mean exercise more, but lean in the sense of the processes that you use. Do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and have you thought about what effort you might be wasting doing things that don’t need to be done? Some of that’s about priorities, but some if it is just about being efficient. Here’s a clear introduction from the Cardiff University's Lean University team about what lean is and is about – there’s lessons and benefits for all of us.

So there’s three steps: read the future, think about it in a structured way, clear the decks so you can react.