Operations & Strategy
THE Impact Ratings 2027 — Diagnostic & Submission Planning
A diagnostic review of KIIT's previous Times Higher Education Impact Ratings cycle, and a dated plan with named owners for the 2027 submission.
Institutional · prepared for KIIT · internal documents
- Reports
- 61 + 40 pages
- Score model
- Within 0.4 pts
- Projected gain
- +4.0–4.35
Problem
The Times Higher Education Impact Ratings assess universities against the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, using evidence each university submits. Preparing that submission touches schools, offices and governing bodies across the university. Without a shared standard for evidence and a named owner for each item, evidence gets compiled under deadline, goes out of date between cycles and is hard to check before it is entered.
Approach
The work started as a diagnostic. The previous cycle's published outcome was read indicator by indicator against THE's published methodology, to separate what the evidence said from how it was presented, dated and linked. Evidence was then mapped across all 17 SDGs into an indicator register that records, for each indicator, whether its evidence can be reused, needs refreshing or has to be written from scratch. The resulting plan has central actions that apply to every goal, an evidence specification for the teams compiling it, a policy review and dating exercise, and a sequence of dated milestones with named owners leading to an internal target ahead of the submission deadline. A blind dry run comes before sign-off.
Highlights
- KIIT's 2026 score (88.4, band 101–200 of 1,603, 0.9 points from the top-100 cutoff) rebuilt from THE's published weights to within 0.4 points
- 350 scoring rows decoded; 30 indicators found stuck at one-third credit, and three falls from full to one-third credit traced to THE's shift to machine-first evidence validation
- The previous cycle reviewed indicator by indicator against the published methodology, with inferences labelled separately from what the sources state
- Evidence mapped across all 17 SDGs into one indicator register, each item marked to reuse, refresh or rewrite
- An evidence specification written to be circulated on its own: one indicator per page, self-contained, dated and publicly accessible
- Responsibility assignment (RACI) across governing bodies, the quality office, schools and central offices
Architecture
Select a layer to read why it is there.
Each finding is traced to a source; anything inferred from the figures is labelled as an inference.
Every indicator gets one status, so the scale of the work is visible before any page is written.
Rules that apply to every goal are set once, centrally, before the goal-level work begins.
Each indicator has a named owner in the school or office that holds the underlying fact.
A reviewer who has not seen the work opens each cited page cold and scores it against the rubric before sign-off.
Decisions & trade-offs
Diagnose before planning
The plan starts from the previous cycle's results read against the published methodology, not from a list of new initiatives. That keeps effort on what the rating actually assesses, and shows which gaps are about presentation and which are about activity.
One indicator, one self-contained page
The evidence standard asks for one page per indicator that answers its question by itself, with dates and scope, instead of long compiled reports full of links. That means more pages to write, but each one can be checked and reused on its own.
Named owners rather than a central scramble
Each indicator has an owner in the school or office that holds the underlying fact. A quality office is accountable for the evidence library, and a steering group meets weekly during the submission window. Coordination costs more up front, but the evidence stays current between cycles.
A blind dry run before sign-off
Before submission, someone who has not seen the work opens each cited page in a clean browser and scores it against the rubric. It takes time at the end of the schedule, and the plan protects that time rather than compressing it.
Impact
Gives the university a documented process for the submission: one standard for what counts as evidence, a named owner for each indicator, and a calendar that keeps evidence current between cycles instead of rebuilding it each year. The work is also a first step from engineering into management, operations and analyst work.
Outcome
- A 61-page diagnostic and strategy and a 40-page submission action plan, organised as central actions for every goal followed by one section per SDG.
- Indicators triaged: 43 need new evidence, 31 a refresh, 113 can be reused and 15 portal figures need checking, for a projected gain of 4.0–4.35 points.
- Scenario model: 88.4 with no change, 90.0–90.4 (about rank 80–87) after the first horizon and 92.3 (about rank 50–55) by 2028, with nine decisions put to leadership.
- A dated milestone sequence with an owner for each step, ending in an internal submission target a few days before the deadline.
- An annual operating cycle (policy review, quarterly activity returns, evidence refresh and a results review) so the next cycle does not start from scratch.