The Arts Tower reappears

Programme Board earlier this week, with only one new Project Definition to approve - for a Student Attendance Monitoring system. This is mainly to fulfil the legislative requirements around the new Points Based Immigration system introduced by the UK Border Agency aimed at International students, but will also be used to monitor all students to enable us to pick up any problems and identify where support might be needed.

We also had our regular item of looking at progress on all projects, with good progress on a number of them including the VLE review, our portal review and our media hosting project.

Yesterday I had a never ending series of meetings, from 0830 to 1730 with even my 30 minute lunch break taken up with having a photo taken of the Exec for the Annual Report. I'm pleased to report that our intrepid photographer (who perhaps wishes to remain nameless) managed to get one decent one of the four of us with all of us with our eyes open and looking vaguely happy!

One of the meetings yesterday was the Professional Service Executive Directors with the Registrar looking at progress on a number of workstreams. These included work on Corporate Communications and Planning and Budget setting. One of the largest and most complex workstreams is on our Estates Strategy as we try to reduce our running costs and carbon footprint. This will involve some moves of departments, including the Professional Services, as one of our major capital projects comes to fruition. The Arts Tower is a 19 storey grade 2* listed building which opened in 1965 and has recently been undergoing a major refurbishment. It's spent the last few months completely covered by wrapping, and on cloudy days has disappeared from the landscape. It is just starting to reappear, and the top floor is already visible as the wrapping and scaffolding comes down. - it will take 26 weeks for the scaffolding to be struck completely.

Plans for the re-occupation of the building are currently been drawn up, and will allow some consolidation of services. It will be an exciting time. It is popularly believed, although there is no documentary evidence, that the Arts Tower is based on the the Seagram Building in New York. It certainly looks similar to me!