What is the UniForum Programme?

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 UCL, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Durham, Leeds and several other Russell Group peers.  

In order to understand how we can better support our Imperial community into the future, we needed to better understand how colleagues are spending their time, and their experience of using our services. Our participation in the UniForum Programme has provided us with baseline data insights into our relative professional services performance and resourcing.

Our aspiration is to provide a world-class end-to-end professional service and the results from the study have helped to provide a lens on successes, the areas with the biggest performance gaps, as well as the areas that are the most important to staff. This will directly feed into decisions made on where to target service improvements and investment to make the support of teaching and research more effective across Imperial.

Imperial participated in the UniForum Programme, developed by Cubane Consulting, for the 2022-23 academic year.

What did our results tell us?

Imperial’s UniForum data highlights above average spend and below average effectiveness overall:

• Service Effectiveness results indicate staff satisfaction with professional staff services is below average overall. A common theme amongst service users was to praise staff but to feel let down by inefficient systems. Sentiments towards staff varied across the surveyed activities. In some areas, service users mentioned how staff would go above and beyond but this came with a reliance on knowing the right people. In others, service users felt let down by inconsistencies in the quality of service provided.
• Imperial’s normalised cost is above the global average. This is driven in part by a higher average cost of employment. However, Imperial has a uniquely high revenue premium for taught students. View a graph of Imperial's Overall effectiveness score versus normalised cost (pdf).
• Aspects of Imperial’s operating model are worth reviewing in context of sustainable growth. Transactional activity (activities that are repeating and are critical for effective operations) is more devolved to Departments at Imperial than average, and delivered more often by generalists. Imperial also has more managers than average and with narrower spans of control.
• Improving user experiences with people and systems, as well as greater consistency across Imperial, will have the greatest impact moving forward.

How were the results shared?

Results at a university level were presented to senior leaders at the University Management Board and Operations and Infrastructure Committee February 2024 meetings. Organisational area and service results summary packs have been shared with operational leads. If you would like further information about your local results, please contact your Department Operations Manager or service director. 

What’s next?

We will not be able to solve all our operational challenges at once, but we now have a valuable baseline from which to springboard as we plan and measure progress. Our initial focus will be on getting the foundations right for a world-class end-to-end professional service. This will be achieved together through a combination of locally identified improvements, Imperial-wide Great Service Programme initiatives, and opportunities identified through the Service Design Programme.  

The first phase focuses on improving our People, Finance and Research Post-Award services, which will contribute to a much-needed step change that will help alleviate workload pressures and enable colleagues to spend more time on things that make a difference to our research, students, and each other.