A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits whether a water-bubbler's digital refill count predicts its repair priority, and finds it mostly predicts foot traffic instead.
A blind condition audit of 56 campus water-bubblers finds Facilities' refill-counter ranking barely predicts which ones actually need fixing
Facilities ranks the University’s water-bubblers for repair by a single number: how hard each tap gets pressed. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checks what that number is actually tracking.
Dr Mirela Hanke and Dr Bram Ntuli set a blind condition audit — flow rate, chill delay, basin wear, scored by assistants working from fountain codes alone — against 22 weeks of the counter’s own tally and against where each of 56 fountains actually landed in Facilities’ repair queue. The counter’s read and the audit’s independent assessment barely moved together; queue position tracked foot traffic near lecture changeovers far more closely than it tracked anything a technician would call condition.
We didn’t set out to embarrass the repair queue. We set out to see whether it measured what everyone assumed it measured, and now we have an answer we would rather not have needed fifty-six fountains to reach.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement
“The queue isn’t going away,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “But the case for weighting it by anything other than footfall just got a lot easier to make.”
Facilities is not being asked to change how it ranks repairs; only to say, precisely, what the ranking has been reading all along.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ajnbof.