Wednesday 22 April 2015

Achieve more, benchmarking and call centres

The last time I posted, the 24 hour lecture was about to take place. Well, it did, supported by several staff from CiCS, and some of us made it for the full 24 hours! I took lots of pictures, and intend to write it up as a diary of the 24 hours, as soon as I find the time.

This week there's been a collection of meetings. Business Continuity Operations Group, where we looked at how we might set up and run a call centre in the case of a major incident. Technically not really a problem as we could get it set up fairly quickly provided we could get to the space and the kit, but staffing it might be a bigger problem. Staff would need training, we'd need access to different language speakers, and depending on the nature, severity of the incident, we might need several shifts of people. A number of options being looked at, including buying the service in if we needed it.

We had a meeting of  heads of department with  UEB and Professional Service directors, where we discussed the "Achieve More" challenges which we introduced this year for all first year students. Next year it will be rolled out to level two students as well, but in a different format.  Lots of discussion on the format, the academic challenges, and the logistics. this year we had all first year Arts and Humanities and Social Science students doing it in the same week - that's about 3000 students, so to say it was a logistical challenge would be an understatement. But, we coped, and plans are already underway to improve it for next year.

The only other meeting I'll comment on was a presentation about benchmarking - a proposal to benchmark the costs of different services across the whole University, looking at all staff who are not academics and allocating time to different tasks. Other Universities are taking part, so we would have  data to compare. Not sure yet if we're going to take part, will keep you all posted.

The rest of the week has been general catching up and preparing for some meetings coming up next week.

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