Dear colleagues,
Adapting for continued success – Governance Efficiency Review
Background to the Review
In common with other universities, the University of Aberdeen is operating within the broader changing and increasingly challenging landscape for higher education. Within this context, the University has undergone significant institutional realignment over the past few years to enable financial sustainability.
The effect of all the change has been for more and more decisions being pushed up to Senior Management Team level, and a blurring of boundaries between Court, SMT, and Senate due to a lack of certainty around roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities. We are committed to ensuring that more decision-making is delegated, so that it sits in the right place, whether that is School, Professional Services, Senate, SMT, or Court. In seeking to ensure greater subsidiarity, there is a need to understand and then articulate structural arrangements with greater clarity than at present. This review is seeking to resolve a governance structure which is fragmented, disconnected, and at times unwieldy, and this must be addressed to ensure the University does not find itself in an unsustainable place as the higher education sector experiences more fiscal constraint in the coming years.
Furthermore, stronger links across our governance structure will ensure more purposeful collaboration, stronger knowledge exchange, better communication, and will potentially provide greater understanding and clarity.
To this end we are embarking on a Governance Efficiency Review across all strands of governance, Court, SMT, Senate, and General Council.
A key aim of the review is to reimagine our approach to governance and decision-making ensuring that we have streamlined processes, we make the best use of time, remove duplication, distractions, and bureaucracy, engage people in a meaningful and valuable manner and ultimately make decisions faster.
Through the Governance Efficiency Review we hope to remove unproductive time and ensure all elements of governance have a purpose, effective use of technology, and that time is given back to colleagues to focus on areas that drive value. By focussing on efficiency, the University wishes to ensure that all practices are aligned to the delivery of the University’s Strategic Plan Aberdeen 2040.
As part of the process, the University has commissioned higher education specialists from SUMS Consulting (a not-for-profit university membership organisation) to support the review, using funding which has been carried forward from previous years.
The review will be informed by a targeted listening exercise across the University. This includes interviews with governance support leads and chairs of key standing committees and groups, and online focus groups with a cross-section of academic and professional services leads. SUMS will also review key documentation and observe selected committee or group meetings.
Additionally, SUMS will carry out research to identify any innovative and effective practice with comparable universities and in other sectors (such as NHS or local government) to feed any insights into the review.
Ruth Buckingham and Helen Baird from SUMS will lead this work and facilitate the interviews and group discussions during May and early June 2025.
A final report from the review will be prepared by SUMS in June 2025 and presented to the University Court on 25 June 2025.
Ultimately, we need to ensure that the University is in a better place in terms of collaboration, decision-making, problem-solving and appropriate subsidiarity. To get there we need to understand and articulate better our current arrangements, and where responsibility lies. This review is a step towards that goal, and I am grateful to everyone who will contribute.
Best wishes,
Samantha
Samantha Waters
Chief Governance Officer and University Secretary