A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement finds a shared AV-cart usage logger's raw ping count entering Facilities' capital-planning minutes within three weeks of deployment, even as the logger's own booking-match rate fell across the ten-week pilot.
A ten-week pilot across 22 AV carts finds the logger's booking-match rate falling as its raw ping count already shapes next year's capital plan
Facilities’ capital-planning process runs on numbers nobody outside the unit sees from one term to the next; this term, for the first time, one of them came from a University-built instrument only ten weeks old. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, Counted Before It’s Checked, reports on a clip-on power-and-motion logger fitted to 22 shared lecture-hall AV carts, built to test whether the activity it counts as a “ping” lines up with an actual booked class. Facilities began citing the logger’s raw totals in capital-planning minutes within three weeks, well before the poster’s own validation exercise had finished running.
The audit set ten weeks of logged pings against the room-booking system’s confirmed class list, tracking how closely the two moved once cart users became aware the count mattered.
We’d rather a number’s shortcomings surface while it’s still only informing a budget, not after one’s been signed.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
By the pilot’s tenth week, only 38% of logged pings lined up with a confirmed booking, down from 71% in its first — a gap the School traces less to the logger itself than to what everyone around it learned to do once they knew it was there. “A number moves fastest when it’s still new enough that nobody’s asked where it came from,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas. “We’d like the validated version to catch up before the business case does.”
The release forms part of the School’s continuing effort to test its own instruments before anyone outside it has to.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zhqdoo.