08 June 2021 
Phil Copestake, Managing Director - UK
Blog written by Nous | Cubane
It’s a question people in strategic planning and other university leadership roles can be forgiven for asking: isn’t benchmarking a luxury our institution can’t afford right now?
It’s understandable that some people may be sceptical of benchmarking if their past experience has left them disappointed. But done well, benchmarking helps universities during exactly such a challenging and uncertain period. Done really well benchmarking gives you real-time resourcing data, the ability to substitute approximation for total confidence, practical decision support tools and the means to engage key communities throughout your university. Joining the collaborative UniForum programme gives you all of this and more.
The Nous Group and UniForum teams would love to hear which of these four priorities is most important for you: visit us during the week of the conference at our virtual stand.
Events are moving more quickly than ever as the UK emerges from the pandemic and as governments hurl new financial and regulatory challenges towards universities. In this context backward-looking data has much less to offer strategic planning.
Thankfully UniForum has kept pace: in 2020 we began offering the ability to collect data in-year and update it progressively, giving a baseline view of total operations spend accompanied by forecasts for the full year that become more definitive as months go by.
Want to know whether you’re spending more on timetabling than student welfare services? Or how much capacity there is for widely-distributed general administrative functions? These data can be provided within weeks, not months, to inform decisions about your operating model.
Students, unions, governing bodies and governments are all demanding more from universities, meaning the stakes have never been higher. With resources finite and decisions complex, HEIs need a firm foundation. UniForum benchmarking provides just that.
The results are assembled through a rapid bottom-up, university-owned process (rather than consultant-led approximation) and data are validated as part of quality checks to ensure accuracy. And only the UniForum benchmarking model accounts for 98 per cent of the variation in operations spend between institutions, enabling true like-for-like comparisons between very different universities.
Great data matters, but great decisions matter more. Benchmarking with UniForum means getting access to practical decision-support tools like the Implementation Planning App (IPA). The IPA shows exactly which roles will be in scope for planned change, and highlights what other activities will be impacted, allowing a much better-managed process.
UniForum is a uniquely collaborative approach to benchmarking. A university ends up not only with highly reliable results giving like-for-like comparisons with UK and global peers, but perhaps more importantly all managers across the university have been involved in the process and understand where the data have come from and what they mean. This is thanks to UniForum’s transparent, inclusive and engaging process: it takes a little more time input across the institution, for sure, but one hour per manager per year is more than worth it in terms of building much greater buy-in and willingness to get on board with the efficiency and other improvements that flow from the results.
To find out more about how UniForum benchmarking can help your university make better decisions during 2021 and beyond, contact UK managing director Phil Copestake: phil.copestake@cubaneconsulting.com
