Demise of XP and other things

More strategic liaison meetings with the Faculties this week. Discussion centred around their priorities for the coming year and how we could help, and also about what developments we were planning which might impact on them. We're well into our planning round at the moment so we're also looking at financial forecasts and proposed budgets for next year.

Had a meeting this afternoon with senior managers to talk about recruitment. Two particular areas - trying to encourage movement between different departments for Professional Service staff by promoting internal secondments for short term posts via our Sheffield Professional web site. We've used this route recently to successfully fill a number of posts, but we've identified process issues to sort out, especially around the speed of filling replacement posts. We also talked about how to improve the pool of applicants for our externally advertised posts - being less precious about what is an "essential criteria" for example, including "a good honours degree" which appears in many job specs where it is not actually necessary.  Language is also important - we've found for example that advertising an "IT Assistant" rather than an "IT Technician" increases the proportion of women applying.

One of the big things we're doing at the moment, like many places, is pushing people to get their machines off Windows XP and onto OSX, sorry, meant Windows 7 or 8. :-) Lots of communication with departments, but not a lot of time left. Lots of info for Sheffield people here. Another of the famous CiCS videos might be about to be launched.....