Liaison and other stuff

Good couple of days walking in Ludlow last weekend, despite the mist and fog.  Back yesterday, and spent most of the day in meetings.

We're in the middle of our liaison meetings with the Faculties, and yesterday we met with the Faculty of Arts. As usual we shared information on our plans and new developments, and discussed with them what help they might need in delivering their objectives. Flexible learning is high on their agenda, so we'll be looking at how we can support them in that. Many of our developments concentrate on reducing complexity, not just in our techncial set up, but also in how users access and use our services.  Rolling out Google apps to staff in the New Year will help us with that as we can concentrate our efforts on some other areas.

We talked about two other big projects just starting including improving some complex business processes, where I hope we can use a technique such as LEAN to crack some of our more problematic areas, including the whole programme structures/approval/regulations process. The second project is IT as a Shared Service where we're looking at the relationship between central IT support and departmental IT support.

Then a Professional Service Directors meeting where we discuss University wide projects and issues, a key one at the moment being the pensions review. We also touched on Shared Services, particularly the government's belief that we could save a lot of money and become more efficient if we shared some back office systems. More on that later.

Finally a meeting to look at the structure and content of our Annual Report which will hopefully be out at the end of the year. based on our service areas, it will pull out how we've approached and delivered key objectives.

Then home to score many exceptional award cases - I'm on 3 panels this year, and have spent this afternoon in one panel, and will spend most of tomorrow in two more.