The School of Continuous Improvement's 2021–2026 Impact Report traces how a logistics major's parcel-locker turnaround score reordered a strip-mall newsagent's queue, and commits the School to a published annual review of its own internal instruments.
Five years of shops-and-commerce fieldwork, told in interviews with the people at the counter
The School of Continuous Improvement has released its Impact Report 2021–2026, five years of work condensed into a single, occasionally uncomfortable conclusion: the shop counters, checkouts and service windows the School spent the period studying already knew what their own dashboards did not.
Nobody wrote a rule that says browsers wait. The score just made it easier to let them.
— day-shift lead, a strip-mall newsagent, quoted in the report
The report’s central finding, gathered from interviews with counter and checkout staff across dozens of partner sites, traces how a logistics major’s parcel-locker turnaround score quietly reordered who a newsagent served first, with no rule ever written down to make it so. The pattern repeated in a shift-rostering override button, and, less comfortably, in a compute-hours metric the School had itself introduced to justify an expansion of shared research infrastructure.
“Five years of listening to counters taught us more about our own instruments than we expected to learn,” said Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, who led the report. “The next step is turning that same interview method on ourselves, on a fixed schedule, in public.”
The report commits the School to an annual published review of every internal measurement instrument it relies on, with no exception carried past a single cycle — a commitment the University counts among the harder-won achievements of the reporting period.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jl3o8r.