23 April 2014 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
Why do we ‘benchmark’ against other institutions? That’s the question posed by Stephen Yorkstone, Senior Consultant for Sustainable Futures at Edinburgh Napier University, writing in the Times Higher this week. He admits that there are some perfectly good reasons for doing so, but he also wonders whether HEIs could gain as much from looking harder at themselves, as well as organisations in completely different fields. After all, “as any school child will tell you, trying too hard to copy what the cool kids are doing only ends in tears”.
Of ‘benchmarking against ourselves’, he explains that “We understand our own institutions uniquely well. It is tough to take a long, hard look in the mirror, for doing so may reveal a few unexpected warts – but it can also induce smiles of recognition as people realise that they have already done some pretty amazing work in the past. And that means they can do some pretty amazing work again.” Alternatively, benchmarking against wildly different organisations can be useful for gaining unique insights. He suggests improvements in class timetabling might be understood through comparing it to turnover of aircraft at terminal gates, and lists an example where colleagues from his Estates team redesigned handling helpdesk calls following a visit to a military base. He then advocates a risk-taking approach:
“Having obtained such insights, institutions need the confidence to stand out from the crowd and to implement the new ideas. This is easy to say but much harder to do, especially in an era of performance measures and league tables. But surely it is misguided to spend an excess of effort on examining how competitors have done on such measures or to try to copy blindly those to whose positions we aspire. Going out on a limb is likely to be the best way to maximise our own performance, and the example we set will also enrich the sector as a whole.”
