A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds that naming a single accountable owner for a campus water bubbler speeds its repair, and that the effect survives the named owner's own absence.
A natural experiment across 146 campus water bubblers finds the effect holds even when the named owner is on leave
A small brass-effect plate now sits beside eleven of the campus’s water bubblers, each engraved with a single name: the Facilities staff member the University holds responsible if that bubbler runs dry or breaks down. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement set out to test whether the plate does anything besides look official.
Comparing 68 bubblers assigned a named owner against 78 left on the University’s ordinary, unassigned fault queue, the study found named-owner bubblers repaired in a median 4.1 days against 7.0 days for the rest, a gap present from the pilot’s first month and unchanged by its last. A second test complicated the obvious explanation: repair times were no different in the weeks the named owner was rostered on than in the weeks they were on leave.
We evaluate accountability arrangements for a living, which makes it a little uncomfortable to find one of our own working for a reason we did not design in. We are publishing it anyway.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Osei Vandermeer, the paper’s co-author, said the Review Cadence Observatory would be watching whether the effect holds if the Named Asset Ownership pilot expands beyond its three metering zones, “since an effect that scales is still worth having, even if it isn’t the effect anyone originally asked for.”
The School counts the finding as a win for its habit of auditing its own initiatives as closely as anyone else’s, whatever the audit turns up.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.74mgdl.