Generating bespoke value and impact evidence to inform a thought-leadership approach to service engagement

Purpose Previous papers delivered at the 10th and 11th Conferences on Performance Measurement, shared our approach to developing a new service and performance model at Sunderland. That model and is now fully embedded within... [ view full abstract ]

Purpose

Previous papers delivered at the 10^th and 11^th Conferences on Performance Measurement, shared our approach to developing a new service and performance model at Sunderland. That model and is now fully embedded within our Library and wider Student Journey Service where it underpins our increasingly evidence-based service culture, design and delivery.

In this paper we will share how our maturing model is enabling us to generate evidence and articulate the insights we draw from that evidence to inform and underpin our strategic service planning, resourcing and reporting. We will demonstrate how impactful articulation of these insights through data-visualization is enabling us to employ thought-leadership in our relationship management with stakeholders, by increasing their understanding of the benefit of engagement with our service offers and demonstrating value for money and the value and impact of our role in achieving institutional objectives.

Our paper will give an overview of the key techniques of our model and will then demonstrate its practical applications using the following examples:

• How our model is underpinning our approaches to thought leadership in relationship management by enabling us to effectively generate and articulate evidence to inform strategic faculty action plans.  
• How our model has enabled us to develop a new graphical approach to annual reporting.  By combining the variety of data-sets generated by the model we are able to articulate the outputs and impacts of cross-service holistic service offers and to clearly demonstrate how they fulfil institutional strategic objectives.

Design, methodology or approach

Our model is self-designed and continually evolving to meet current service need. We will demonstrate the key methodologies which influence our model:

• Strategic marketing theory:  provided us with the framework to re-focus service design around a customer-centric approach to benefit-based service offers which subsequently enable us to generate outcome-focused evidence
• AMOSHEE Toolkit (AMOSSHE, 2011): this toolkit is designed to help Student Services professionals undertake evaluations of value and impact.  It informed our ‘rounded narrative’ approach to evidence generation
• Our snapshot approach to evidence capture which enables us to focus on and evidence engagement with current strategic priorities
• Our campaign approach to facilitating conversation with our customers in order to capture these ‘rounded narratives’ of evidence
• Our progress in using innovative data-visualization technique to create tailored and impactful narratives and insights from our analysis which increase the impact of our data
• Our commitment to a relationship management approach and the importance of agile and targeted evidence in informing strategic action planning

Findings

We will discuss our key findings including:

• The importance of embedding our model at the heart of our service culture – both in terms of involving staff in data generation and of developing an evidence- based culture of service planning
• The benefit of meaningful data, analysis and insights in helping to inform and underpin strategic conversations and relationship management
• The transferability of our model across service settings
• The agility of a snapshot approach in enabling us to evidence and inform current strategic service priorities
• The impact of a ‘rounded narrative’ technique in articulating powerful human insights which demonstrate engagement, impact and value
• The importance of creative data-visualization techniques in communicating our insights for maximum impact with our customers and stakeholders. 

References

http://www.amosshe.org.uk/valu...  (accessed: 14th February 2017)