Reassessing a University School of Language and Social Science’s Portfolio Delivery
The Business Challenge
The purpose of this project was to improve the efficacy and efficiency of professional support services and teaching processes within a leading UK university so that they align better to changing academic requirements and external market forces. The particular challenge was that one school within the university, the School of Languages and Social Sciences, had declining numbers and an increasingly diverse range of course offerings with fewer and fewer students on each. Delivery of courses was becoming untenable from financial and operational perspectives and the systemic success factors of change causing this needed to be better understood, consensus built about what to do about these and remedial action taken.
Action Research and Systems Thinking
PrOH Modelling was used to simultaneously review strategic and operational processes at different levels because this enabled roles, processes and tasks to be more purposefully redefined and reengineered to more closely meet endogenous organisational requirements and exogenous market forces.
Numerous stakeholders with a diverse range of backgrounds were interviewed. These included teaching, research and management staff as well as student representatives and members of the university executive. PrOH Models were created unifying these different stakeholder perspectives into a PrOH Model and presented to a broader audience within the school and central university services via the PrOH Modelling story boarding technique.
Benefits
This project resulted in some rationalization of courses and departmental groups and later led to the school merging with other schools into a college to gain efficiency from economies of scale in their back-office operations and marketing which strengthened their combined teaching portfolio and research centre presence.
Abducted rationalisation was used to reflect upon the 4V’s (volume, variety, variation over time and visibility) concept of operational characteristics. The project had positve international implications as many students were recruited from outside the UK.
Further Details
Work from this project was published in a well-respected academic journal
