A Slop University paper audits departmental mail pigeonholes into a four-cell Retention Quadrant and reports the classification adopted, unchanged, as the basis for next year's allocation.
A four-cell audit of clearance and volume now decides which staff keep a physical pigeonhole next year
Slop University’s Facilities division has spent a term putting a number on something it has always allocated by instinct: who still needs a pigeonhole. The School of Continuous Improvement’s new Retention Quadrant sorts every departmental mail slot into one of four cells — Live, Buffered, Fallow, or Overrun — built entirely from how often a slot is cleared and how much sits inside it between clearances, and the department has adopted the resulting classification as the basis for next year’s allocation.
This year’s audit tells us which pigeonholes we can retire. Whether it will still be counting the right thing once staff realise what a busy pigeonhole gets you is the question we’re leaving for whoever runs next year’s count.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Staff whose pigeonhole falls in the two lower-retention cells move to digital-only distribution from the start of the coming year, a change the Facilities committee confirmed at its most recent quarterly meeting. The work reflects the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing interest in instruments a department can run itself, without new equipment or an external contractor, from data the daily mail round already produces.
“An allocation rule a department can recompute from its own spreadsheet is worth more to us than one three points more accurate that only Facilities can run,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “The Retention Quadrant is built to be owned, not just consulted.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.emmgl8.