We’ve been happy to trail the new tool that we are launching today for some months now. I guess we are excited by it. It’s called the AUDE Self-Assessment Tool, or AUDESAT. And we hope it’ll become a standard part of ‘the way you do things’. We picture using the tool as an annual activity, helping you understand the standard you’ve reached within your university estate, and so plot the way forward.

Some of you will choose to use it with the whole team, opening up transparent conversations about performance and targets and improvement.  At launch, we’ve set three permission levels. The entire team will be able to read the outputs, while senior colleagues will be able to edit and enter data, and act as administrator for the tool. You’ll be able to change those permissions as necessary. Perhaps you feel management time will need to be spent on interpreting and prioritizing of the results and recommendations the tool will give you.

Today we are sharing the tool for the first time, and only with senior members, though of course we’ll share more broadly with the wider membership soon.

We think using AUDESAT should become a standard annual activity.

Some colleagues will find AUDESAT to be of maximum value immediately after a job change. Has your new position brought you into a new environment, or given you new responsibility within a familiar team? AUDESAT gives you the chance for a better understanding of performance, and at this kind of career stage – a new beginning – it might feel especially valuable to have a sense of what is going well and what isn’t.

So what is AUDESAT?

• A complete update for a new generation of a tool from much earlier in AUDE’s story, refreshed and aligned to current challenges
• An online tool developed for us by Provelio
• A way for you to benchmark against anonymised sector averages from others also using the tool
• The tool will evaluate performance across 8 key areas: Estates Directorate, finance, space, soft FM, hard FM, sustainability, capital works and accommodation
• A source of key recommendations that institutions can follow to make positive changes. These recommendations are based on the assessment results and benchmarking data
• An online user-friendly platform accessed by members through a single sign-on process using existing AUDE credentials. Anyone within your team who is registered with AUDE can access the tool, as directed by you

Resources

A number of resources are available to help you use the Self-Assessment Tool.

• Webinar recording: ‘How to get more from AUDESAT’
• FAQs

Our hope is that the new AUDESAT tool will give every estates team a big boost in understanding and monitoring performance, and we look forward to talking to you about your experiences of this tool in live use.