Optimising academic portfolios and resources
The new economics of higher education are leading universities to look anew at the ways in which staff and other resources, such as space, facilities and information, are deployed across their portfolios of revenue-earning and supporting activities. Whereas universities were once regarded as fixed-cost operations, the challenge in future will be to ensure that all resources are managed flexibly for optimal value and impact.
We work with university management teams, at both central and departmental levels, to understand the complex relationships between staffing and activities. Looking at how these affect costs, revenues and margins, and to evaluate different models for deploying scarce resources across academic and supporting activities.
We do this by:
-
using bespoke business modelling techniques, drawing data from multiple separate systems to enable detailed analyses of academic and supporting operations
-
working collaboratively with client staff groups, to develop and evaluate alternative ways of deploying resources across university services
-
benchmarking institutional and departmental performance against similar operations in other universities and where relevant in other sectors
-
working with client teams to understand and address the practical implications of more-effective resource and portfolio management.
The clients we have worked with in this area include Warwick University, Bishop Grosseteste University College, University College London, Institute of Education and the University of Copenhagen
PRINT
EMAIL