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Cardiff University

Impact Calculator

 

The experience of the Cardiff project team illustrates an alternative approach to carrying out an appraisal and retention management initiative and as such offers an interesting comparison to that provided by Oxford.

 

For Cardiff, many of the drivers behind this work stemmed from the need to reduce the accumulated backlog of HR files stored by the university, thus ensuring its compliance with the Data Protection Act and helping to prepare the ground for the University's new electronic employee information management system (Cardiff People) by reducing the volume of records requiring scanning for entry into the new system. This resulted in a 'front-loaded' appraisal project specifically designed to address these legacy issues, as well as putting in place the foundations for a future managed approach on this basis and thus a direct contrast to the 'from this point on' approach taken by Oxford. It led to Year 1 project costs (including implementation costs) of £83,089.28 and a resulting Year 1 deficit of £65,542.36.

 

The percentage changes in performance achieved by the project were significant, estimated to result in a 55% reduction in the time taken by HR staff to find information on personnel files from Year 2 onwards (from 47% in Year 1) and a 72% reduction in the time taken to process a personnel file in response to a subject access request during the same period. The project also achieved a one-off reduction of 45% in the volume of paper stored; resulting in a saving of £19,960.79 in anticipated scanning costs.

 

And yet these process improvements did not equate to monetary savings anywhere near sufficient to deliver a return on investment on the significant project costs incurred. The huge upfront Year 1 costs were partly to blame and meant the project was always going to have to deliver some spectacular savings to claw this back, but do not account for the full story. For even in Years 3-5, after the main backlog of records had been addressed, the revised process was estimated to be running at an ongoing deficit of £1,023.54 per annum. The reasons for this deficit appear to be related to the ongoing nature of project costs (reflecting the fact that appraisal activity needs to be a rolling activity if a future backlog is to be avoid) compared with the one-off nature of the main financial benefit (the 45% reduction in paper requiring scanning). It should also be noted that as with Oxford, Cardiff chose not to include internal storage space saved as a monetary benefit, despite the project estimating to save them 52.73 shelves of space by Year 5.

 

The reduction in time taken to process personnel files in response to a subject access request received under the Data Protection Act is also an interesting point of note. The monetary saving anticipated from the change initiative in relation to this process equates to just £35.38 per year from Year 2 onwards but is, of course, of (literally) immeasurable importance in terms of ensuring the University's ability to comply with the law.

 

As the project team noted:

 

"The calculator also did not capture the potential savings in terms of legal compliance costs which benefitted from the project."

 

Download pilot results: Cardiff University Spreadsheet