A School of Continuous Improvement case study traces a suburban bowls club's honesty-box case-review process across fourteen months, finding its sign-off authority widened from one raffle to every cash-handling activity the club runs, with no measurable gain in audit accuracy.
A fourteen-month case study at a suburban bowls club finds a committee's honesty-box audit widening into sign-off authority over every raffle, revocable only by unanimous vote
A committee convened to check one honesty-box shortfall at a suburban bowls club has, fourteen months on, become the club’s standing authority over every raffle it runs.
Dr Bram Ntuli, who convenes the School of Continuous Improvement’s Improvement Grand Rounds, led a case study of the club’s Honesty-Box Case-Review Subcommittee from its founding meeting to its most recent AGM. The record shows the subcommittee’s sign-off requirement widening five times, from the Tuesday raffle’s cash box alone to every cash-handling activity the club runs, in a sequence of votes the club’s constitution now allows only a unanimous vote to reverse.
A schedule that can only grow is not really being reviewed against anything. It is simply being renewed.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
The team’s comparison of float variance before and after the review found no measurable change in the figure the subcommittee exists to audit. What did change was who was prepared to hold the float at all: the club’s volunteer roster for raffle duties narrowed as sign-off delay lengthened, with a smaller core of stewards absorbing a growing share of the work.
Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, said the case sits squarely inside the School’s growing case-method record of standing review formats, and that a finding of this kind is exactly the sort of institutional self-knowledge the School exists to produce. The study extends that record across community and workplace settings well beyond the University’s own apparatus.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7gk2wl.