A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews Facilities staff about who actually issues and reclaims keys for the University's shared cabinets, finding the person doing that work matches the register's own accountable-owner listing for barely one cabinet in five.
Interviewing 46 Facilities staff across 71 cabinets, a new paper finds real custody of a shared key rarely matches the name recorded as its accountable owner
For four cabinets in five, the University’s key-register names the wrong person as the one actually managing the keys. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement went looking for the right ones.
Lecturer Bram Ntuli and Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu interviewed forty-six Facilities staff about who currently issues and reclaims keys for seventy-one shared cabinets across twenty-four buildings, then checked each answer against the accountable-owner field the school’s own key-register keeps on file. The two agreed for barely one cabinet in five.
A register’s accountable-owner field was never wrong, exactly. It was just answering a question about who signed something once, not about who is still doing the job.
— Lecturer Bram Ntuli, Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
Restricting the comparison to cabinets the register itself had flagged for a recent audit made no difference: the one-in-five agreement rate held regardless. “We checked whether reviewing the register more often would close the gap,” said Dr Joost Nwosu, a co-author. “It didn’t move the number at all, which turned out to be the more useful finding of the two.”
Facilities has welcomed the paper as the most complete account yet of who its own key-register is actually describing, and says the accountable-owner field will stay on file while it reviews how names are assigned to it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.w45vmw.