A School of Continuous Improvement paper uses the staggered rollout of a supervisor-endorsement requirement across the five Capability Sprints to show the rule reshapes who applies far more than how well they complete the course.
An accidental delay in rolling the requirement out across the five Capability Sprints becomes a natural experiment in who a supervisor sign-off actually screens
The signature was supposed to tell us something about readiness. What we could actually show it changing was who applied.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement
Sabel is a co-author, with Dr Dagny Okafor, of a new paper examining the supervisor-endorsement requirement introduced across the University’s five Capability Sprints. The rule reached three Sprints on schedule and two a full intake later, a delay the course catalogue’s own publication cycle produced rather than any deliberate staged rollout. The gap between the two groups gave the researchers an unplanned way to separate two things a single before-and-after comparison could not: whether the endorsement improved how well people did once enrolled, or simply changed who showed up in the applicant pool.
Pooling records across all five Sprints, the study finds the share of applicants already holding a supervisory or coordinator-type title rose sharply the moment each Sprint’s gate took effect, and stayed there. Completion rates, by contrast, moved by only a couple of percentage points either way, and by about the same amount whether or not a Sprint had adopted the rule yet. A parallel peer-endorsement pathway, introduced for applicants without a direct supervisor, produced a statistically indistinguishable shift of its own.
For the School of Continuous Improvement, the finding folds into what the Sprints team is now calling its admissions review: a standing brief to treat every entry requirement as a hypothesis about who it lets in, not just who it is meant to.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6tfowf.