Colleges and universities can’t magically create more prime space or prime time slots during the week. They also can’t fix a space shortage solely by measuring their utilization. So, what can they do to resolve their academic space problems?

 

They must strategically manage the allocation of prime space during prime timeslots – which we call bottlenecks. The key to bottleneck allocation is governing the accepted bottleneck requests down to available bottleneck timeslots. Bottleneck allocation strategies need to be evaluated on an institution-to-institution basis – they are not “one size fits all.”

 

For instance, spreading utilization into non-prime time hours is the most obvious strategy, but its effectiveness is surprisingly varied across institutions. The strategy of setting objective criteria for the requesting of prime rooms during prime hours works well for large capacity rooms and technologically-enhanced rooms. For example, activities with low enrollment capacity or low historical enrollments should not be able to request large capacity bottlenecks. Sections not requiring technology should not be permitted to request technology-enhanced bottlenecks.

 

Other proven strategies include enforcing standard meeting patterns in bottlenecks, reducing room ownership by departments, and correcting data regarding bottlenecks in the space inventory. The key, again, is that you can prove that the strategies selected are sufficient to resolve the space crisis on your campus. Once you can do that, it is much easier to gain needed support for implementing these changes.

 

Next week, I’ll discuss the benefits of transforming these allocation strategies into a formalized academic scheduling policy.

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