We are now wrapping up our fourth Bottleneck Study. Our first, for the University of British Columbia, is outlined in a case study that can be accessed at http://www.aais.com/documents/ubccasestudy.pdf

In case you haven't scoured our web site or seen a conference session that we have done, these studies are designed to directly address the allocation of your most prime rooms during primetime. The result of the study is a data-driven academic scheduling policy to meters out those rooms in a way that is equitable and that allows the campus to grow enrollments without adding new rooms to their inventory.

There are always activities that don't need to be scheduled into your bottlenecks. As an example, let's assume that your bottleneck is a common one: technology-enhanced classrooms. If there are 200 activities requesting 150 3-hour time slots during primetime, then you have a bottleneck. The obvious questions are these: do all of those activities really need those rooms during those times? Shouldn't there be a fair way to allocate those slots across my academic departments? If there was a policy in place, would I get yelled at less often?

The good news is that we have learned that the answers are typically: No...not all of these activities really need those rooms during those times. Yes...there is a fair way to make these allocations. Yes...an established policy means that the scheduling office stays out of the fight freeing them to do their job. In other words, this approach really works.

Want to grow by 10% in the next two years? Then build a policy that can free 10% capacity in your bottleneck(s). You can't argue with the logic that 200 activities can't go into 150 slots. You also can't argue that there should be a policy in place to define the rules and promote fairness.

Version VII takes the next step in automating the enforcement and refinement of such policies. For more information, please download our white paper on the topic: www.aais.com/documents/bottleneck white paper.pdf