A new Slop University paper introduces a five-level maturity model scoring water-cooler bottle-swap discipline, and reports its adoption as a binding condition of a floor's service contract.
The Adaptive Metrics Lab's new five-level ladder scores 84 floors on bottle-swap discipline, and Facilities Services already enforces the cutoff.
Eighty-four floors across nineteen Slop University buildings have spent a semester under continuous surveillance of an unlikely kind: a load cell fitted beneath each floor’s water-cooler bottle, reporting its weight every five minutes to the Adaptive Metrics Lab. The result, published today in a new Slop University research paper, is a five-level Water Cooler Readiness Maturity Model, and a service-contract rule that already treats the model’s third rung as a floor, not a target.
A dry bottle was exactly the kind of incident that never used to reach an agenda. Now it doesn’t need to — the sensor already decided what happens next.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
The model scores each floor from three weighted signals — how quickly a dry bottle is swapped, how completely that swap is logged, and how much of the swap schedule is set in advance rather than triggered by an empty reading — folding them into a single composite readiness figure that resets each month. Facilities Services has since made the model’s third level a standing condition of a floor’s water-cooler service contract, with no provision to waive it between audits.
“The ablation is the interesting part for us,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “Take away the sensor and the floors barely move. What Facilities does with the score once it exists is a decision the model itself doesn’t make.”
The University reads the deployment as its evaluation ecosystem doing exactly the kind of quiet, continuous work it was built to do.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.g7tyi1.