A School of Continuous Improvement trial finds a stencilled bus-stop boarding-queue line produced no measurable change over six weeks, and the University's new signage campaign advertises the line staying anyway.
A School of Continuous Improvement trial finds six weeks of stencilled boarding-queue paint made no measurable difference, and the line stays anyway.
Six weeks ago, Facilities stencilled a single boarding line along the platform edge of a suburban bus stop the University uses for its regular commuter studies. Today’s advertising campaign, from the School of Continuous Improvement, carries the trial’s result onto the University’s signage rotation: doorway crowding and boarding time held inside their ordinary week-to-week range for the whole trial, and the line is being kept regardless.
The School treats a measure that changed nothing as no argument for removing it once it exists, and the boarding line now enters the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s standing protocol list, unreviewed until further notice.
A result that changes nothing is still a result we can point to, and pointing is most of what the line was ever asked to do.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
The trial ran at a single stop for six weeks, comparing doorway-crowding counts and door-to-seat boarding times against the six weeks immediately before the line went down. Neither measure moved outside its usual range on any day of the trial, and no follow-up study is planned.
The campaign is live on the University’s bus-stop and campus-screen signage rotation, and the underlying trial is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4zkqud.