A School of Continuous Improvement research poster reports an eighteen-week car-park sensor deployment where a turnover bonus tied to dispute-closure speed collapses closure times, with no matching change to whether the reported vacancy was correct.
An eighteen-week sensor trial across ten car parks finds dispute-closure time collapsing once a turnover bonus starts paying on speed
A blinking light over a numbered bay, a paper ticket curling out of a wall-mounted terminal, and a duty officer with a few minutes to clear it before the shift log notices — this is the ordinary texture of SLOT, the sensor-and-dispute system a new School of Continuous Improvement poster unveils today, and the unremarkable thing it has done to a car-park bonus scheme.
A bonus finds whatever it’s pointed at. Ours was pointed at the clock.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The eighteen-week deployment paired SLOT’s bay-sensor mesh with a duty-officer workflow across ten car parks, logging every disputed vacancy call to the second while a bonus schedule, fixed for the trial’s length, paid out on how quickly a flag closed. Median closure time fell from forty minutes to under eight across the fleet, tracking the bonus’s introduction almost exactly; the contract carries no equivalent term for whether the closed call was right.
“The dashboard doesn’t need to know why the number moved, only that it did,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory.
The University reads the trial as further evidence of a discipline it has spent several cycles refining: building the instrument first, and asking only afterwards what it should be judged by. A follow-on deployment is already scoped, tying part of the bonus to a blinded spot-check of closed calls.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.q5teg3.