Overview

The Strategic Programmes and Change team is currently supporting Imperial's participation in the UniForum Programme, developed by Cubane Consulting. UniForum is a data-gathering exercise on support services-related activities – from HR, IT and Facilities to Student Support and Teaching Administration - providing member institutions with a global benchmark.

​​​​​​​Insights are based on data from 60 universities across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada, and within the United Kingdom, including at UCL, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Durham, Leeds and several other Russell Group peers.  

Our participation in the UniForum programme will provide us with baseline data insights into our relative professional services performance and resourcing. The process includes all staff delivering professional services across the whole College, not just central departments. Without fully understanding the end-to-end resourcing of our support services, our understanding as to how we can better support our Imperial community is limited. Our workforce data is not currently sufficient to give us an adequate picture of the pressures teams face every day. To plan how we can best support our Imperial community into the future, we need to better understand what takes up our colleagues’ time. 

Our aspiration is for the exemplary delivery of services. This more profound understanding of operations will give us a lens on successes and the areas with the biggest performance gaps that are the most important to staff. This will enable joint decisions on where to target service improvements and investment to make the support of teaching and research more effective.

Service Effectiveness Survey

In addition to the data collection exercise, all staff will be invited to share their feedback on the support services that matter to them. The Service Effectiveness Survey will gather vital insights from our community into their experiences of the College’s key administrative and support services, including HR, ICT and Finance. Your feedback will help us to understand which areas are working well, and which areas require further investment.

The survey is structured into two parts, which together collect service effectiveness data. The first part of the survey will be open to collect feedback during 19 June - 7 July 2023. Staff will receive a personalised email invite (from 'noreply@surveys.cubaneconsulting.com') with a link to the survey. The survey should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete. The feedback data analysis will be carried out independently by Cubane and response data will be shared in a de-identified form. We will follow up with the second part of the survey in the Autumn Term.

More information about the Service Effectiveness Survey can be found on the UniForum SharePoint site.

Primary Contacts and Respondents

As part of the UniForum programme, senior administrators within the College (e.g. Departmental Operating Managers, Faculty Operating Officers and Heads of Services) will be asked to review data that has been collated by their ‘Respondents’ describing how we are resourcing our administration and support services.

'Respondents' are members of our community who have been identified by their senior administrator 'Primary Contact' to provide data describing how we are resourcing our administration and support services, based on their understanding of how their teams divide their time. The first data provision period for Respondents will take place over three weeks, between 12-30 June 2023.

Once Respondents have submitted their data, their Primary Contact – who will be familiar with the operational function(s) of the team – will review the information. This review process is scheduled to take place between August and early September 2023.

These checks will strengthen data quality and will thereby give College confidence that the benchmarking outcomes from this data collection are accurate. 

More information about the roles of Primary Contact and Respondent can be found on the UniForum SharePoint site.

---

Thank you to all Imperial staff for your support and contributions. Our collective work now will help us to prioritise and invest in the areas that will better support our Imperial community for many years ahead.