A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits the campus makerspace's 3D-printer induction sign-off sheet against its own checklist revision log, finding most ledger-valid signatures certify a version already retired.
A crosswalk audit finds most currently valid 3D-printer sign-offs certify a checklist version Facilities revised months ago
The School of Continuous Improvement’s running audit of the University’s own instruments has a new subject: the laminated induction sheet clipped beside every 3D printer in the campus makerspace. Facilities has revised the safety checklist behind it six times in fourteen months; a new poster asks how many signatures on it still certify a version no longer in force.
Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu and Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa built a lightweight crosswalk tool matching each signed induction’s date against Facilities’ own checklist revision log, across 214 signed inductions over nine teaching periods. The compliance ledger, which counts any sign-off within 24 months as current, was left untouched — the team wanted to know what that rule tracks, not to replace it.
A sheet can only certify the version it was signed under. Ours just hadn’t been asked which version that was.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The crosswalk finds the share of ledger-valid sign-offs citing a since-retired checklist version rising from 18 per cent after the first revision to 61 per cent by the sixth, even as the ledger’s own reported currency rate held steady between 92 and 96 per cent throughout. Recency and version-currency, the poster notes, are not the same question.
“We’re not saying the 24-month rule is wrong,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. “It was never built to notice a checklist moving out from under it, and six revisions in fourteen months is a lot of moving.”
The makerspace’s technical staff are trialling a version-stamped sign-off field ahead of the checklist’s seventh revision.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7eu1tu.