Professional Services Analytics

A flagship multi-year solution providing university leaders with data insights, benchmarking, and a collaborative practice sharing network for optimising services to better support teaching and research.

Professional Services Analytics is a multi-year solution that enables professional service leaders to build the capabilities they need to drive continuous improvement within their university and supports similar universities to learn from each other. A unique strength of Professional Services Analytics is its diversity across the scale, research intensity, geography and discipline mix of participating institutions, enabling unique analysis into the costs and effectiveness of university administrative services.

This diversity enables Professional Services Analytics benchmarks to consider factors such as scale and research intensity that are outside the control of the administration management, but focuses their attention on efficiency and effectiveness drivers that are in their control.

Using a proprietary apples-to-apples method of benchmarking, member universities have repurposed 6% of their revenue from administration to the core mission of teaching and research. These investments have enabled universities to enhance programs, make research investments, attract leading faculty and significantly improve their world rankings.

No other benchmarking approach offers the depth of insights provided by Professional Services Analytics. Unlike other benchmarking offerings, it supports the university and its academic leadership to understand what choices, often unconscious, are contributing to the results. With its leadership engagement programs and tools, Professional Services Analytics provides the data and insight university, and faculty executives need to strategically manage their administration and support services.

To date, over 75 leading universities have benefitted from Professional Services Analytics across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Canada and Mexico.

Why Professional Services Analytics?

Target investment in areas that align with strategy
- Drive transparency of end-to-end spend on services and their alignment to strategic priorities
- Assess the efficiency and effectiveness of professional services relative to peers through a world-leading benchmark model, ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons
- Create leadership alignment on opportunities to repurpose capacity towards greater impact for students, academic mission, and other institutional objectives
Design scalable, end-to-end service models
- Access robust data to uncover the drivers of efficiency and effectiveness at your institution
- Reveal process fragmentation, imbalance of role seniority and specialisation relative to work delivered, and capacity spent on transactional versus strategic activities
- Engage with peers to unlock sector lead practices and accelerate design and change efforts
Improve budgeting and workforce planning
- Integrate end-to-end functional data into budgeting and workforce planning processes to achieve greater transparency around function-based resourcing decisions across the entire university
- Embedding a whole-of-institution view into functional budgets enables better management of capacity and informs longer-term staff profile planning
- Understanding the drivers of efficiency enriches budget decisions related to cost constraint vs. revenue generation
Plan, deliver, and track major change
- Build transparency and trust through evidence-based discussions to replace anecdotal debates
- Create and quantify the case for change and access powerful analytic tools to design and model the impacts of major transformations and investments, then act with confidence
- Tracking both spend and effectiveness over time helps universities monitor benefit realisation and rebalance effort between investments
- Year-on-year tracking of results enables benefits realisation and garners community confidence in change efforts
Engage stakeholders in continuous improvement
- Empower functional leads, academic leads and transformation teams with out-of-the-box dashboards, tools and lead practice insights to deliver targeted change at the local level and establish a culture of continuous improvement
- Program insights and best practice case studies guide the adoption of automation, consolidation of effort and process simplification required to streamline non-strategic work and improve overall efficiency

Target investment in areas that align with strategy

Drive transparency of end-to-end spend on services and their alignment to strategic priorities
Assess the efficiency and effectiveness of professional services relative to peers through a world-leading benchmark model, ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons
Create leadership alignment on opportunities to repurpose capacity towards greater impact for students, academic mission, and other institutional objectives

Design scalable, end-to-end service models

Access robust data to uncover the drivers of efficiency and effectiveness at your institution
Reveal process fragmentation, imbalance of role seniority and specialisation relative to work delivered, and capacity spent on transactional versus strategic activities
Engage with peers to unlock sector lead practices and accelerate design and change efforts

Improve budgeting and workforce planning

Integrate end-to-end functional data into budgeting and workforce planning processes to achieve greater transparency around function-based resourcing decisions across the entire university
Embedding a whole-of-institution view into functional budgets enables better management of capacity and informs longer-term staff profile planning
Understanding the drivers of efficiency enriches budget decisions related to cost constraint vs. revenue generation

Plan, deliver, and track major change

Build transparency and trust through evidence-based discussions to replace anecdotal debates
Create and quantify the case for change and access powerful analytic tools to design and model the impacts of major transformations and investments, then act with confidence
Tracking both spend and effectiveness over time helps universities monitor benefit realisation and rebalance effort between investments
Year-on-year tracking of results enables benefits realisation and garners community confidence in change efforts

Engage stakeholders in continuous improvement

Empower functional leads, academic leads and transformation teams with out-of-the-box dashboards, tools and lead practice insights to deliver targeted change at the local level and establish a culture of continuous improvement
Program insights and best practice case studies guide the adoption of automation, consolidation of effort and process simplification required to streamline non-strategic work and improve overall efficiency

What University Leaders Say

“UniForum has benefited us through its valuable networking opportunities and by enabling objective benchmarking of costs on a like for like basis. Its structured data has provided excellent insights and prompted us to ask ourselves challenging questions about service delivery models, efficiency and effectiveness.”

Adrienne Cleland

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Operations & Registrar, University of Auckland, NZ

“UniForum is helping us to have data driven conversations around our services so that we can work together across the university to reduce complexity and increase satisfaction.”

Aimie Chapple

Vice-President (Operations), University College London (UCL), UK

“Using UniForum we have developed a greater understanding of our staff's daily roles, the benefits of which are not just about cost; it's about better structure and ensuring service capacity where needed.”

Greg Fowler

Vice-President Administration, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

"UniForum supports evidence-based change that enables truly transformational and enduring efficiency and effectiveness of professional services."

Mike Shore-Nye

Senior Vice-President and Registrar & Secretary, University of Exeter, UK

"UniForum has enabled Macquarie University to achieve improved clarity in our operational processes across faculties and portfolios, directly supporting resource allocation and service provision to our academic and student communities. "

Jonathan Wylie

Vice-President Strategy, Planning and Performance, Macquarie University, Australia

Some of the universities we work with

OUR INSIGHTS

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A holistic solution for university leaders

Together with UniForum Service Effectiveness Assessment and Teaching Effort Analytics, Professional Services Analytics provides robust data, benchmarking and practice sharing to help university leaders drive sustained improvement and better manage their resources.

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