During a time when excess spending and extra funding is brought under tight scrutiny, The Orbital can reveal that senior staff at Royal Holloway awarded a contract to Harvest Earnings Group, Inc, of Chicago, Illinois, to help design an ill-fated initiative known as Project IDEA.

Acting Principal Rob Kemp

The project’s title, an acronym for Ideas Driving Excellence In Academia, was launched, without any notification to the student population at large, on 2 February 2009. The external consultants from the United States were to assist with achieving what College documents termed ‘the art of the possible’.

The Orbital has acquired official documents, mired in management jargon, outlining the launch of Project IDEA and its subsequent demise.

The College’s aim ‘to be in the top tier of UK universities’ was one of the goals of the project. With significant pressure on the budgets of both the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the research councils, Project IDEA’s primary focus was to ‘explore alternative sources of income’.

Championed by the outgoing Principal Stephen Hill, the project was abandoned on 27 March 2009 by Deputy Principal Rob Kemp.

When questioned as to how much time and money was spent on the project, senior College management sources refused to comment, replying ‘it would be impossible to determine’, but disclosed ‘the overwhelming majority of the cost to Royal Holloway was seconding staff to work on the project.’

The original plans to ‘generate, evaluate and recommend good ideas’ across a 100-day period created a new set of over sixteen complex management committees. Senior RHUL staff were to form a ‘Steering Committee’, as well as delegate ‘Team Leaders’ and ‘Resource Leaders’ across all sectors of Royal Holloway’s operations.

Representatives from Harvest Earnings were hired to ‘make sure [they] follow the proven process’, with the ‘part-time, intensive’ work to be born by College management.

Harvest Earnings is said to have an ‘unparalleled track record of success’, helping major institutions such as Heinz and Bird’s Eye redesign their operations to improve revenue.

The details of the contract to Harvest Earnings disclose that seven offers were received in negotiations before the final contract was awarded on 22 January 2009. Royal Holloway’s official statement explained that the selection process involved ‘interviewing three consultancy firms’ and complied with legal requirements that ‘contracts do not discriminate in favour of British companies.’

The chief contact for this transaction, defined as ‘a Surplus Improvement Project’ to forecast Royal Holloway’s expenditure up until 2012, was Dr. Gordon Mousinho.

Dr. Mousinho, former Director of Operations, left RHUL earlier this year to ‘work in an environment more aligned with his previous experience’.

Both Harvest Earnings and College staff were unable to detail specifics of the agreement surrounding the contract ‘in order to protect [their] relationship with contractors in the private sector’.

Internal communication about the project has been sparse, with only three intranet communications obtained by The Orbital over the lifetime of the project.

Professor Hill’s correspondence on 27 January 2009 via the Bulletin Box Intranet Service informs that ‘the university sector now faces the most difficult external environment since the 1980s’. Professor Hill went on to admit ‘we will need to contribute an extra 2% of staff pay to support pensions in 2009… for these reasons… we [must] review and simplify our processes.’

Not only were College staff expected to make ‘two critical contributions’ but, in an official FAQ about the project, those employees directly involved in the initiative at a senior level were also ‘asked to limit their holiday as appropriate’.

Promising to ‘implement and track’ the best ideas as early as May, there were to be ‘no sacred cows’ in the comprehensive review.

Had the College decided to implement any ideas gained during the project ‘that would impact on students’, they promised ‘[they would have] consulted in the normal way’. This ‘normal way’ was not clarified.

When questioned as to the wider implication of the proposed ‘reduc[tion] in low-value activities’, Liz Owen, President of the Students’ Union told The Orbital that ‘the definition of a low-value activity simply does not exist. The concentration of the project would have been far more effective with clarification of how this would affect the individual departments of the College and more crucially, the student experience.’

Liz went on to say ‘very limited consultation – one half hour meeting – was held with the Students’ Union and the effect of these “reductions” on the organisation or our membership was never communicated.’

However, the project’s official documentation affirmed that ‘[they] will not do anything that will jeopardize the quality of our teaching or research’.

When questioned by The Orbital, Holloway management promised that the Students’ Union ‘will be organizing a meeting at the start of the next academic year where all students will have the opportunity to question members of Royal Holloway’s management team about any matters of concern’.

In his official message accompanying Professor Kemp’s termination of Project IDEA, he prioritised efforts to ‘reflect on how best to further the ideas consistent with our culture’.

Professor Kemp concluded his internal correspondence in March that Royal Holloway remains dedicated to the most important goal of Project IDEA: ‘driv[ing] us closer to our students’.