Monday 23 January 2012

Not an awayday

Last Friday myself and the three Assistant Directors spent a few hours of quality time together in an awayday follow up. Every year we try and have one or two days of facilitated training and planning away from Sheffield,  and then a couple of days during the year to follow up on how we're getting on with our actions. We didn't actually go away, and we didn't have a full day, but called it an awayday all the same!

We spent some time reflecting on the last 6 months, identifying achievements and frustrations. Although there were some frustrations we could point to, there were many achievements, and even the frustrating experiences had led to a lot of learning, especially things that we could do better to stop them happening again.  We also looked forward to our current planning round, and in particular how we can prioritise better - we need to include everything in our prioritisation processes, and be much more transparent. Our staff also need support in being able to say no - we never have the resources to do everything that we're asked to do, but need to make sure that we target our resources to supporting key University objectives effectively.

We also talked about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - how do we know we're being successful, and delivering what our customers want? Do we really know how well we're doing?

A useful few hours as always, but lots of actions coming out of it which we're going to work on over the next few weeks.

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