The University of Glasgow has signed up for a four year benchmarking exercise commissioned by the Russell Group.  It’s called Uniforum, and is run by a company called Cubane. The aim is to deliver a better understanding of the services that are provided to support teaching and research. Ten RG universities have signed up for year one, with others joining in 2016. Results from similar exercises in Australia have shown the programme to be highly effective.

An initial meeting with Cubane was held at the end of May.

Dorothy Welch, Deputy Secretary and Executive Sponsor of the project told E News, “Uniforum is about making our services to support the University’s teaching and research better. Once we have the information on how we and others deliver our services and how we perform against each other, we can then decide what to do about it.”

Image of the Uniforum universities initiative“Data will be collected from across the university, but the vast majority of the work will take place within the project team.  Data will also be gathered in Finance (for Payroll and Procurement data) and in HR (for Staff data).”   Managers and supervisors from all units will be asked to provide data on what activities their MPA, technical and operational staff have been engaged in over the past 12 months, a process that should take around 6 hours in total to complete for each area.  Research and teaching activities themselves are not included in the data gathering.  Heads of service across all of our academic and service units (Primary Contacts) will have the opportunity to review the data to ensure its accuracy, and full training will be provided.

Dorothy Welch added, “This is a very important project for the university, and to make it effective we have to ensure that we have 100% engagement. Although I appreciate how busy we all are, this should not take up too much additional time and the project team will be on hand to answer questions and assist you through the process.”

Over the coming weeks the project team will be in touch with Primary Contacts to identify the survey respondents and to arrange training ahead of the collection of data which should begin in the middle of July. It is expected that early results and comparisons with other institutions will be available towards the end of the year.   Who are the project team? Executive Sponsor – Dorothy Welch Project Sponsor – Martin Boyle Project Manager – Kirsty Scanlan Data Analyst – Jacqueline Jack Project Assistant – Allison Jones

If you have any queries about UniForum, please email UniForum@glasgow.ac.uk or phone 0141 330 4440

First published: 8 June 2015

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