A new Slop University paper audits twenty-two leisure centres against a five-stage Cancellation Recovery Maturity Index and finds assigned stage tracks an internal waitlist far more reliably than what members actually see on the public booking screen.
A five-stage Index tracks how fast a cancelled court reappears online, though the public booking screen barely moves.
A cancelled squash-court booking used to vanish into whoever noticed it first. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement gives that moment a stopwatch instead: the Cancellation Recovery Maturity Index (CRMI), scoring twenty-two leisure centres on how fast a same-day cancellation reappears as a bookable slot.
Solveig Adeyemi, Dagny Okafor and Torun Ezeigwe assessed each venue across four quarterly rounds, reading the booking platform’s cancellation log against an independent record of what a member actually saw on the public screen. Assigned stage climbed steadily, with nine of the twenty-two venues reaching the top two stages by the final round.
A timestamp only ever tells you when something was logged, not who it was logged for. We think the Index has always known the difference; whether the venues reading it do is a separate question.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
The two records did not always agree. Duty managers at several of the highest-scoring venues described a shared habit — offering a cancelled slot first to an internal waitlist before it reaches the public screen — and the Index’s own timestamp counts either the same way. Venues remaining below the Index’s third stage for two consecutive quarters lose their place on the University’s Preferred Venue Directory.
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, said the ablation was the part she trusted most: “when we took a weighting factor out and nothing moved, that told us the factor was decorative rather than load-bearing, which is worth knowing before anyone else asks.”
For the Evaluation of Evaluation unit, the audit is the kind of instrument-on-instrument check its remit exists to run.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1072nr.