Enabling Benchmarking Excellence Project

Background to the Project

Across the HE sector, significant moves are being made to incorporate benchmarking techniques into institutional planning and performance monitoring activity.

One of the greatest barriers to this is the granularity of nationally published data sets, which are organised into structures, such as academic cost centres (ACC), which do not allow meaningful benchmarking below the level of the institution as a whole. 

Project Scope

The Enabling Benchmarking Excellence project proposes to begin work to overcome this barrier, by gathering a set of metadata detailing institutional organisational structures. Institutions organise themselves according to a variety of functional models and this is often a significant issue when attempting detailed analysis of data.

This metadata will be applied to the new academic cost centres (as determined by the current HESA cost centre review) and the way in which these map to academic units.  This will facilitate a three dimensional relationship map that will allow data to be disaggregated and compared in a meaningful and robust way.  Initially we will use a select range of partner institutions selected to cover a wide range of organisational structures.  While this project aims to deliver a proof of concept, the eventual aim is to make comparative analysis far more flexible and useful to all stakeholders within the HE community.  The outcomes will therefore be taken forward by HESA as part of its benchmarking provision across all HEIs in the sector.