A School of Continuous Improvement impact report follows a community hall's booking-app review score into a 4.6-star floor that closes slots automatically, and into the standing review clauses the School is now writing into every internally adopted threshold, its own included.
The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021-2026 follows a volunteer coordinator's 4.6-star booking floor into the School's own review of its own adopted thresholds
We kept auditing whether the floor was being applied correctly. It took us most of a year to ask the only question that mattered, which was whether it should still be there at all.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The floor Dr Nwosu is describing belongs to an ordinary community hall, and the School of Continuous Improvement’s Impact Report 2021-2026, published today by the Office of Research Outputs, spends a good part of its pages inside it. A volunteer coordinator’s booking app closes every hire with a one-to-five star prompt; that prompt hardened, unannounced, into a rule that shuts a slot’s calendar the moment its trailing average dips under 4.6 stars, with no manual override and no exception sustained beyond a booking cycle.
The School reads the case as an instance of a pattern its retrospective keeps circling back to: an instrument never meant to decide anything starts deciding everything, once somebody schedules from it instead of just reading it. The report traces the same shape through a regulatory commission’s own triage dashboard and a professional-services firm’s utilisation model, then turns it on the School’s own Evaluation of Evaluation program, which cleared every governance check on its own adopted threshold without ever asking whether the threshold should exist. The University counts the exercise among the plainer proofs of what continuous improvement is meant to mean: instruments checked, including the ones the School built itself.
“It doesn’t feel like a small case to us anymore,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the Evaluation of Evaluation program. “It feels like the shape most of our own instruments eventually take, if nobody is watching.”
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fyv0fk.