UMSU slams corporate services provider
The University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) Students’ Council has delivered a stinging rebuke to its University-owned corporate services provider, MUSUL Services, in a meeting this afternoon.
MUSUL, short for MU Student Union Ltd, is responsible for providing back-of-house services to the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU). These services include human resources (including MUSUL acting as the legal employer of UMSU staff), IT and finance.
MUSUL are “completely failing to effectively provide the services they’re funded for”.
— James Bashford, UMSU General Secretary
Noting a series of deficiencies in MUSUL’s service provision, the Council directed the General Manager of UMSU to explore “alternative arrangements” to the current model. This raises the possibility that UMSU will seek to outsource some or all of those services.
UMSU bases its complaint on the results of a “User Assessment Survey” conducted in late 2015. This survey is mandated by the service provision agreement between UMSU and MUSUL.
A copy of these results, obtained by Parkville Station, shows intense dissatisfaction by UMSU staff and student representatives towards services MUSUL provided. MUSUL’s provision of human resources and finance services fared the worst, recording 46% and 71% dissatisfaction rates respectively on the key ‘quality of service’ metric.
For its part, MUSUL says it is “working with UMSU to improve communication and expectations and improved service delivery”, and that it prepared service improvement plans in the middle of last year. Trevor White, MUSUL CEO, also said that MUSUL had experienced a significant increase in workload without additional funding, and provided statistics showing an increase in workload, particularly in facilities and staff induction.
Updated 7.30pm Wednesday 2nd March with response from MUSUL.
image credit: Polly clip / CC-BY-SA-3.0
