Reshaping a Support Team - Academic Research

Introduction

Our client was a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI).  It needed to ensure that the support team in one of its departments was focused on activities that added the most value for the academic and research staff.  There was a concern that the team had become siloed and had a habit of taking on activities themselves that were either unnecessary or that were already done elsewhere in the faculty or the university.  The academic and research staff was frustrated at a lack of support in areas that would be most helpful for them, the support team’s solution to which was to ask for more staff.

We were asked to review the support team’s activities in full and to determine, with the client, any opportunities to reduce or even eliminate current activities.  This would reveal the feasibility of the support team taking on responsibilities that were of value to the department’s academic and research staff without the need to increase the size of the team.

Our approach

We asked the support team to tell us about the work that they did.  We captured this information using a survey which was completed by everyone in the team.  The survey asked respondents to think about how their time was divided between a set of business processes.  The list of business processes was designed in consultation with the team.  It covered activities that are common to most organisations, plus those that were specific to the team’s setting.

The data gathered enabled us to see the work of the team through a number of different lenses.  This helped us to answer important structural questions, such as

• Was the right work being done by the right people?

• Did managers ‘manage’, or were they drawn into non-managerial work?

• Was the team focused on work that added the most value for academics and researchers?

• Was the team burdened with unnecessary work?

• Was there the right balance between inward-facing operational support and outward-facing promotional activity?

Our findings and recommendations

We found that roles within the team were highly fragmented (44% of their activity accounted for just 10% of their overall effort).  Only 33% of the team’s effort directly supported the core academic and research work of the department – its prime purpose – although other aspects of their work provided indirect support.

24% of overall effort was spent on outward-facing marketing, communications, PR and commercial activities.  While clearly important, this seemed high for an operational unit, especially as this was distracting the team from inward-facing support activity that was needed most.  The team had been behaving less like the operational support unit that it was intended to be, and more like a commercial unit.

We found the amount of rework to be high at 18% of contracted hours.  This was a dead-weight loss which, quite coincidentally, exactly matched the amount of goodwill (unpaid work done over and above contracted hours) that the team provided and the vacancy rate.

We debated these and other findings with the client and helped them to identify the ‘true north’ of the support team – the team’s primary purpose.  With this decided, we were able to quantify the savings possible from the current profile of work if the team were to transition to being a pure support unit with a modest marketing capability.

We proposed a means to reshape the team so that it focused more on supporting core work.  In so doing, the team could reduce job fragmentation which we suggested would improve organisational performance and job satisfaction.

The outcomes of our work

We demonstrated how our client could

• eliminate 18% of the work currently done (which would automatically remove some rework) and

• in time reduce the remaining rework by half to save a further 5% of effort.

This meant that by filling existing vacancies and without any need for goodwill, our client would be able to redeploy 20% of the current establishment into activities that directly support the academic and research staff.  This would produce a significant benefit without the need to increase the size of the team.

Client testimonial

‘This was a knotty issue and a problem that we had grappled with in a number of different ways over a period of time without really coming to a conclusion.  Before, what we tended to do was tinker around the edges and back-track over certain things.  This approach gave us a structure and a process which people bought into from the beginning.  This helped to generate outcomes that everyone could sign up to.

We have now moved hearts and minds, which puts us on the road to achieving our objectives.  Our staff are heavily invested in what they do.  But they don’t necessarily question the value derived from the activities that they do.  This process has helped them to think about their work in a slightly different way.

We chose The Orgworks because we had built a good relationship with them, and they had built a good relationship with our team, which was important in being able to challenge some behaviours.  The work that they did early on helped the team get into the right mindset to challenge their way of working.

We were able to see management information that we previously didn’t have access to, which helps us to make better decisions.  And having insights from The Orgworks into how we compared to similar organisational units was really important.’