A School of Continuous Improvement paper follows a rental portfolio's self-testing smoke alarms from weekly fault log to technician dispatch, and finds the fault type acknowledged fastest is the one that waits longest to actually be fixed.
A sixteen-month rental-portfolio deployment finds the fault dismissed quickest waits longest for a technician, and a repeated reminder does not close the gap
An alarm that gets acknowledged and a fault that gets fixed turned out, once we actually timed both, to be two different promises.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints, School of Continuous Improvement
A new Slop University paper has followed a rental-property portfolio’s self-testing smoke alarms for sixteen months, from the moment each weekly fault first reaches a managing agent’s dashboard through to the day a technician actually attends. The School of Continuous Improvement finds the work sharpens a distinction the School’s broader evaluation-ecosystem agenda keeps circling back to: that noticing a problem and doing something about it are two separate achievements, and a system built to measure the first can make the second look better than it is.
Across 214 properties and 386 logged faults, the paper’s authors found acknowledgment of a fault swift and almost identical across fault types, while the wait for an actual technician stretched from a median of four days for a full alarm failure to sixty-one days for the portfolio’s most common fault, a low-battery flag. A follow-up test of a repeated reminder message, designed to close that gap, moved the outcome by less than two percentage points.
“We built the reminder because it was the lever closest to hand, not because we had reason to think it was the right one,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. “Knowing that now is arguably the more useful result.”
The portfolio’s existing annual paper compliance certificate continues alongside the new self-test log, unmodified by the deployment. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vh3kpz.