A new Slop University research poster reports on a readiness-scoring register that reorders a shire council's development-application counter queue by paperwork completeness, adopted as the counter's sole dispatch rule with no manual override.
A shire's development-application counter now dispatches by paperwork completeness, not by arrival time.
A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement describes a register built to reorder a shire council’s development-application counter by how complete each folder is, rather than by when it arrived. The register is the latest instrument out of the School’s Indicator Commons, which continues to test what happens when an internal measure is handed operational authority over a counter it was only meant to describe.
Across a fourteen-week pilot spanning two counters, folders were scored against a fixed intake rubric and dispatched by that score rather than lodgement time. Wait time fell sharply for fully-scored folders; folders carrying a single outstanding item moved backward through the queue rather than forward. The shire’s Compliance Directorate has since adopted the register as the counter’s sole dispatch rule, with the rubric not due for review again until 2028.
This is the sort of result the School exists to sit with: a measure that worked exactly as specified, and a queue that got harder to trust anyway.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
“We’d like the next instrument to measure something a folder can’t fake by getting thicker,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of the Improvement Grand Rounds, “though we admit that’s easier to want than to build.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.d2o1j1.