A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews staff, students, and the University's floor marshals about who is responsible for reporting a stalled escalator, finding the duty almost universally unrecognised even as Facilities' service standard is met in full.
Forty-eight interviews find almost nobody, including the University's own floor marshals, believes reporting a stalled escalator is their job, even as the service target is met in full by an account no one named
The University’s only escalator has stopped, on average, more than once a fortnight for three years, and each time Facilities’ service log records the same tidy outcome: reported within fifteen minutes, every time. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement asks who is actually doing the reporting, and finds the honest answer is almost nobody the University would recognise.
Lecturer Dagny Okafor, Lecturer Bram Ntuli, and Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel spoke with forty-eight people near the escalator — students, general staff, and every person who has held the University’s floor-marshal appointment since it was quietly extended to cover escalator reporting three years ago — asking a simple question: whose job do they think this is?
A duty can be perfectly assigned and still have no one standing under it. That’s not a contradiction; it’s just what three unrevised years does to an org chart.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
“It’s not that the escalator goes unreported,” said Lecturer Bram Ntuli, a co-author. “It’s that almost everyone we spoke to, including three of our own floor marshals, was surprised to hear it was ever their job in the first place.”
Facilities says the finding raises exactly the kind of question its termly appointment cycle should be able to answer, and is reviewing how the floor-marshal role is communicated to the people who hold it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hfz29u.