A School of Continuous Improvement poster places 61 plumbing-franchise depots on a four-level fuel handover ladder, and the franchise group makes Level 3 the condition for opening a new depot.
A four-level ladder, from Running on the Light to Returned Full, now sets when a new depot may open
Every dashboard in a plumbing franchise’s fleet carries a fuel gauge, and head office has nonetheless asked for a second reading of what the gauge shows at handover. A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, published today, sets out a four-level ladder built to supply it.
The poster is led by Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, with Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, and Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas.
The depot managers kept their books with great care, and the work belongs as much to them as to us.
— Senior Lecturer Dr Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons
The team placed sixty-one depots on the ladder, from Running on the Light to Returned Full, using six quarters of handovers recorded in each depot’s own book. Levels were read from the books, re-read on site by a regional assessor, and compared from one quarter to the next. No depot moved by more than a single level in any quarter, and most settled at the second.
The franchise group has made Level 3 the opening condition for new depots: a depot takes no first job until a regional assessor has witnessed a handover at that level. The University regards this as a sound place to begin. “Level 3 gives a new depot something definite to work towards,” said Dr Vandermeer. The group has named Level 4 as the longer-term aim for every depot, to be taken up in the usual review cycle.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.173h2y.