Executive meeting

Exec Meeting yesterday afternoon - lots of things to discuss, one of which was all the action points we agreed last week. We'll be moving to a new form of meeting schedule starting on 1 August. We will continue to meet each week, but each month one meeting will be a Programme Board where we look at the progress of our projects, consider new proposals and closure reports. Each month we will also have a formal meeting where we consider specific items in detail. This might be our Technology Strategy, or our Teaching and Learning Support Strategy. Agendas and minutes of these meetings will be made available to the department. The remaining meetings each month will be more informal meetings where we catch up on a number of issues and keep each other informed of things happening in the sections. We will continue to produce a monthly digest of these meetings which will be made available to everyone through MUSE. Anyone in the department can suggest matters to the Exec that they think should be discussed. We also want to improve the information flows to and from our meetings, and are open to sugesstions as to how this could be done.

Currently we cover a huge range of issues - from the very strategic to matters of detail that we've been asked for a steer on. Yesterday these included our move to Office 2007 over the summer, the thorny issue of whether staff should wear uniforms and if so what colour (I've gone for yellow....), a proposed upgrade to our webmail client, and how students and staff from one of our overseas partners should access our on-line resources. Hence the need to try and separate them out into different sorts of meetings so that the strategic issues get sufficient discussion time. We also want to improve people's awareness of what decisions we want them to take, what decisions need to be referred to the Exec, and which just need a sign off so that we're aware of them. More discussion will be happening on this topic in individual teams soon.