KITs, ICE and satisfaction.

This week has involved a lot of KITs. No, not little cats, but Keep in Touch meetings. Vitally important for building networks, finding out what's going on, and sharing ideas and experiences. I try and meet most of my senior colleagues for an hour once a month, and this week a lot fell together - Coffee Revolution has done very well out of me this week, but I feel slightly high on caffeine!

Monday was spent in a design team meeting for our New Engineering Building, and we all trooped outside to put different cladding samples out so we could see them in daylight - such a lot to choose from, but luckily we were all agreed, and even agreed with the architect's choice. I think the building will look stunning, and although this isn't a very good picture, gives an idea of what it will look like. Of course, the reason we're involved is the amount of student-led, IC type space it will have in it, including group study rooms and creative media pods which will complement what we have in the IC.

Yesterday we had a meeting to discuss the results of a recent staff survey with our senior managers. This was a University wide survey asking a number of different questions about staff satisfaction with their jobs, their department, their management and the University.  It's fair to say the results were mixed, some good, some where there's room for improvement. So, an action plan is being  drawn up, together with some facilitated discussion events so we can better understand the reasons behind some of the answers.

Today I've been taking to the Janet Brokerage Service about our move to Google, our experiences of contract negotiation, and some of the concerns other Universities seem to have. Hopefully they will be able to take the lead in discussions with Google, as they have done recently with Microsoft, to make it easier for more Universities to move to cloud based services.