This session is part of the HESPA Showcasing Good Practice Week 2026. The aim of this week is to provide a space for our members to share with each other the work they have done which they feel has been a particular success (or which they feel they learnt something valuable from), and to celebrate and promote the hard work of planners in the HE sector.
Synopsis:
This session presents the redesign of the Time Allocation Survey (TAS) process through the TAPAS (Time Allocation Process Augmentation and Support) initiative. It will begin with an overview of TAS as a TRAC-compliant methodology used to estimate how academic staff allocate their time across teaching, research, and other activities, and its importance in informing institutional costing and reporting .
The session will then explore the rationale for transforming the existing TAS process, highlighting key challenges, including legacy dependencies, manual effort, limited transparency, and user-experience constraints. It will introduce the TAPAS solution, which leverages Qualtrics, Alteryx, and SQL Server to automate population selection, improve random allocation methods, and enhance data quality, auditability, and reporting capabilities.
Participants will gain insight into the end-to-end architecture of the new process, including survey design and distribution, data integration via APIs, workflow automation, and centralised data storage. The session will also demonstrate how statistical improvements, flexible population management, and embedded quality assurance checks contribute to more robust and reliable outputs.
Finally, the session will highlight the benefits of the new approach, such as increased efficiency, reproducibility, scalability, and improved user experience, and outline next steps for implementation and continuous improvement.
Speakers:
Constanza Arias-Aldana, Senior Data and Insights Analyst
Rebecca Crowe, Data and Insights Analyst
Juan Camilo Gomez, Data and Insights Analyst
from the University of Cambridge
Tagged : Free Event, Data Evaluation and Visualisation, Strategy Development and Implementation
Type : Meeting
