Will Spinks is chief operating officer at the University of Manchester. With a £1 billion turnover, more than 10,000 staff and 40,000 students, it is one of the UK’s biggest higher education institutions. Rosie Niven finds out how he approaches the efficiency agenda.
Could you reflect on the importance of the efficiency agenda for COOs?
It’s absolutely critical. If you look at the environment in which we are working, we are all trying to do more things and improving the quality of what we are doing.
We’ve got scarce resources – even though they are growing, we have more demands upon them. There are always more things that we could be doing and there are always questions over whether we use those resources in an efficient and effective manner. This questioning is going to get more challenging.
We have a spending review coming in late November and BIS are planning for the possibility of cuts at either 25% or 40%. If you do a very simple sum of what 25% might look like from UK higher education or what 40% might look like, you really need to think very hard about how you are going to be able to respond in that type of scenario – particularly if your institution wants to continue to invest in new things.
What have been the key achievements at the University of Manchester in terms of improvements in efficiency, effectiveness and value for money?
I head the professional support services and the contribution it makes is deeply embedded within the achievements of the university as a whole. The focus for us has been upon agreeing the institution’s vision and strategy and then working out how the professional support service can help deliver what the university is aiming to achieve.
We have continued to invest in support services in pursuit of our vision, focussing upon particular areas. However, we should also be benefitting from running our services in an effective and efficient manner and lowering the total cost of operations as a proportion of the university’s activity. As an institution, we measure that on an ongoing basis and have been successful in hitting this target.
We can demonstrate that despite making investments in our performance we continue to lower the cost of operating the university. How have we done that? Well, some of that is about standardisation of processes, trying to do things only one time, in one place and in one way – we still have significant challenges here.
We’re trying to make processes run across the institution, rather than within a single component because that is where we see the biggest opportunities. For example, we have therefore made changes to our support for research and finance activities across the university, made changes to our procurement activity, creating a more centralised professional group. We have also created an HR services hub to deal with all the transactional activities that take place in HR.
Any future plans, with pressure on finances coming up?
We are looking to get better value from our IT. If you look at our proportionate spend, we probably spend more on infrastructure in IT than we would wish to and less on projects. We would like to be more agile and spend more on projects, taking more projects forward and delivering more value. That’s an obvious area for us to look at.
The other area is our marketing, recruitment and admissions processes. We receive more applications than any other UK university and given the wholesale changes that there have been in the wider system we need to stand back from these and look and see if we could make improvements in our overall processes.
Your title is registrar, secretary and chief operating officer (COO) – do you regard these as three distinct roles and if you do, how do they differ?
There are two different roles there. Registrar and COO I think, frankly are synonymous, especially in the way Manchester is organised.
Registrar is a term that is typically understood in the HE sector but if you use it externally, people tend to think about birth, deaths and marriages, or possibly a hospital registrar. So I will use COO outside the sector and registrar inside it.
The secretary part is distinct, that is an accountability formally to the board of governors to provide them with the governance support and assurances they require.
You have worked in the private sector in a number of senior roles at ICI, Zeneca and AstraZeneca – can HE learn from the work of such companies, particularly in the areas of collaboration and business improvement.
I worked for 28 years in the commercial world and have worked in higher education for eight years. I would very much emphasise that universities are not businesses in the way in which a business in the commercial world is. Universities are more of a coalition of colleagues coming together.
Most universities are also charities and, for example, Manchester is established under Royal Charter. This a very distinct model, with a much wider set of stakeholders that you find in a commercial operation.
Having said that, particularly in a large university, there are common features between what you find in the commercial world and what you find in universities. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for much of my career. The pharmaceutical industry is a long term, research intensive, highly regulated people-orientated business. I have come to a long term, research intensive, highly regulated, people-orientated charity.
There are differences culturally, but there are also similarities. There are areas of the university where learning from business can be applied. And, I would suggest, there is also much businesses can learn from how universities operate.
As universities develop more business-like characteristics, what are the implications for senior leaders?
If there are similarities, it’s being very clear about what you are seeking to do. strategically and organisation in such a way that you have a good chance of delivering.
I think certainly where we are strong here at Manchester is being clear about what we are trying to achieve and from that strategic plan to operationalise what we need to do to make progress towards that very ambitious vision. It would be dead easy for us to sit on our hands and say, “we are a really good institution, we’ll just knuckle down and we will carry on doing what we are currently doing”. But I don’t think that’s good enough.
Others, around the world, are investing in terms of what they wish to achieve in HE. If we genuinely want to be very influential, we have to look at ourselves very carefully and identify the areas we want to invest and put plans in place to do it better.
Can you describe the leadership challenges that COOs face in terms of encouraging cultural change within universities?
I work in a very large institution. There are about 4,700 professional services staff of one form or another across the University of Manchester, whether they are based in school, faculty or a central directorate. To scale is a challenge, when you are leading an organisation of that size, you have to work really hard so that people see themselves as a single team and work effectively across organisational boundaries.
I had some people in our office this morning that have joined us in the past few weeks. They are working mostly as part of a single team in professional support but they are also working also with academic colleagues to help make this university a world beater.
In a large university like Manchester, it is about breaking down those boundaries that exist between the different components, between professional support services and with academic colleagues, working together to achieve common goals.
What do you like to do outside your role?
I am a football fan. I am a Geordie, and I have grown up as a Newcastle fan and suffer the pain and anguish associated with this on a regular basis. I am 57 and Newcastle haven’t won anything domestically in my lifetime. One day, perhaps.
On the other extreme, I also support Macclesfield Town in the Conference and one of the rather nice things is that it has crowd of 1,500 and I probably know about a third of them.
I also love the theatre and I am trying to make more time to read. I’m in a book group and attend more of these meetings that I originally thought I would be able to do. We’ve just finished reading a book about Belgium’s involvement in the Congo.
I have three kids living in London, so I go down to see them now and then, particularly when work takes me to London.
Error correction: Please note that the original post stated incorrectly that the University of Manchester turnover was £880bn.
