The Horizon team continues to move forward with reimagining McGill’s ways of teaching, researching and working. The goal is to change the University’s operations for the better, and good data is essential to their work.
Leveraging McGill data
“We have a rich trove of existing information,” said David Stephens, Academic Lead of Horizon McGill. That includes past budgets, recruitment and admissions statistics, staff and faculty head counts, outside revenue sources and more. That deep data will underpin decisions by Horizon McGill stakeholders, allowing them to better understand the University’s current situation and how best to cut costs and use our resources optimally.
Several working groups – for example, Administrative Efficiency, Advancement and Procurement – have done in-depth analyses of existing financial and process data to help prioritize areas of focus, recognizing the constraints of McGill’s situation and respecting the University’s mission.
UniForum Benchmarking
McGill’s data is also being analysed via UniForum, an online tool that allows McGill to benchmark its administrative functions against those of other participating UniForum institutions. It includes a dozen Canadian universities (such as the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Queen’s University) as well as institutions like the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Australian National University.
“UniForum has helped all these institutions gain a better understanding of their administrative activities,” said Christopher Manfredi, Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic) and one of Horizon’s two executive co-sponsors, alongside Fabrice Labeau, Vice-President (Administration and Finance).
UniForum does three key things:
- It determines faculty and staff’s satisfaction with their university’s administrative functions based on the results of the Service Effectiveness Survey.
- It compares satisfaction rates with the amount of time and money the university spends on those activities.
- It benchmarks that data against other participating institutions.
“Gathering data to inform our decision-making is a critical exercise,” said Stephens. “Benchmarking it against our peers gives us even stronger basis for transforming how McGill works. For example, we might learn that a specific process is implemented at McGill at higher cost than at comparable universities, but also that the process does not have high satisfaction ratings amongst faculty and staff.
“In this case we would work to understand the problem, improve the process, and ideally lower expenses at the same time. We need to look for such enhancements to improve the experience of our colleagues, and should want to do so even if there were no budgetary challenges.”
Horizon expects to receive benchmarked data by the end of 2025 and plans to share the results by early 2026.
Homegrown solutions
Although UniForum is an external tool, “any initiatives stemming from this data will be homegrown, driven by McGillians,” said Stephens.
“We’re using UniForum to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of administrative functions,” said Manfredi, “not the quality or character of our people, teaching or research.
“Those things are core to our identity, which isn’t something that can be benchmarked. It’s who we are, and we’re proud of it.”