School of Continuous Improvement researchers mine the case system behind 268,412 toll-notice disputes and find the operator's published eleven-step pathway recorded in almost every case and, on its own, describing only 13 per cent of them.
Process mining 268,412 disputes at one urban toll network, against the eleven-step pathway its customer charter scores conformance on
Eleven steps are published. Nineteen events are logged. All Eleven Steps Occurred, released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, sets one urban toll network’s published dispute pathway beside the case records of the 268,412 disputes lodged against it over twenty-four months.
The operator scores procedural fairness as the share of disputes in which all eleven steps are recorded, and reaches 97.9 per cent. The study finds the same thing, and then finds what else is there: a median of nineteen events per case, forty-one distinct pathways above the reporting threshold, and only thirteen per cent of disputes travelling the published route and nothing besides. The step recorded in every one of the 268,412 cases, a delegated officer’s internal review, is followed by a change in the recorded determination in 0.4 per cent of them.
A model that is contained in the log will always be found in the log. We would like the question asked the other way round next time, and we are grateful to the staff whose case notes let us ask it at all.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
The work harmonises two records that the sector has long held separately: the pathway an organisation publishes, and the event stream its case system emits while working. Reading them against one another, the team reports, turns an assurance document into something that can be tested rather than displayed.
The University regards the study as characteristic of the measurement agenda the School has been building: patient, unglamorous, and addressed to a document almost nobody reads. “There is a version of this question waiting at every scheme that publishes a pathway,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program. “We would welcome the comparisons this invites.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tsn8gj.