Is there a best way to structure the administration?

Definitions and scope To begin with, what do we mean by ‘administration’? Roughly, the ‘non-academic’ management and operations that support the delivery of teaching and learning, research, and enterprise – in old money, everything that the Secretary, Registrar, Bursar and Librarian would have been responsible for; in new money, the Professional and Academic Services. And what do we mean by ‘structure’? Roughly, the organisational units and roles in the institution, and the relationships between them in terms of reporting lines and career paths. This paper does not cover either academic management structures or governance structures, though I would suggest that since there should be clear relationships between these and the structure of the administration, we are in fact to some extent commenting on them. Shared service, outsourced, spin-out, and entrepreneurial models are also omitted for reasons of space. Why think about these questions? Why is it worth exploring these questions? Primarily because changing the structure of the administration appears apparently cyclically on the senior management agenda – but also because people seem to like to talk about structure, as evidenced by the attendance at the Conference sessions. A variety of reasons are given for looking at structural change, typically: