A testing time..

We take Business Continuity and Incident Management very seriously, and hold a major incident simulation annually. Today we had another - quite scary as usual - and although a group of us were asked to assemble at a particular time with no idea what would happen, we had a suspicion it would be based on a reputation incident rather than a physical one due to the presence of most of our comms team.

So, we arrived, and this was the calm before the storm....

After a short briefing we were off. Thank goodness I wasn't Incident Manager, but part of a standby team - in a separate room, waiting to be called. We were played a short radio clip, supposedly from Radio Sheffield about 4 students being arrested at dawn, supposedly from University accommodation, and not given much more information. NOTE  - THIS WAS A SIMULATION - IT DIDN'T REALLY HAPPEN.  Sorry about the shouting. Apparently simulations have been known to become real incidents when information has leaked and people haven't realised.  As well as the information we were drip fed, we also had a twitter feed to follow. Four members of CiCS had 10 fake twitter accounts with different profiles - students, staff, local resident, journalist etc - and tweeted from them from the duration of the incident. We had the incident team in one room, and the comms team in another. The whole thing was a test of how we would repond to an incident receiveing a lot of media and social media attention, when we had little information. I was late to be called, so I did what I would have done in real life, and stormed in asking what was going on :-)  Then I was asked to step outside (for a breath of fresh air) and was doorstepped by a BBC journalist complete with camera and microphone and had to give a live interview.

Later we had a press conference, with an elected spokesperson and a number of nasty journalists in the audience (including me).

It was very tiring, stressful, enjoyable, interesting - and a great test of how we might cope.  Somethings went really well, others could do with improving, but that's what it was for - to learn from.

What to do if all your IT goes up in flames

Interesting session today about Business continuity and disaster recovery, focusing on the aftermath of the Crowmarsh Fire. Covers some theory and best practice around BC and DR, but I'll just focus on the Dr after the fire. A slightly scary story from the IT Manager for two small Local Authorities in South Oxfordshire.

The main services are provided by the LAs were waste collection, planning and building control, housing, food safety, council tax collection and benefit payments.

All services are shared between the two councils. All staff based in one place in Crowmarsh. Having recently relocated, and left a property which they now lease to Oxford City Council.
The IT department had 440 users. 1 main data centre with remote back up. Mostly on premise applications. Onsite back ups disk-disk-tape. Most Servers virtualised using VMWare. Most data stored on SAN technology. Some physical servers.

Om Thursday January 15. 2015, there was big fire at their location requiring 27 fire crews. Raged from 0330 till late afternoon, then reignited at night. A car loaded with gas bottles has been used in an arson attack. They effectively lost the whole building.

The story for the IT Manager....

Call from building manager at 3.30am to say building alight.
Took on role to raise senior management board and then initiate emergency plan.
Initiated the IT DR plan. Called suppliers to get plan started and equipment delivered. Had a contract with a company for hot standby. About a 4 hour lead time.
Made decision to use the building they had recently moved out of (Abbey House) where there had been a data centre. That had been identified in the plan.
Contacted BT to get numbers rerouted. That was also in their plan. Redirected to the switchboard in another building
Contacted IT team and relocated to them Abbey House.

Crisis management team had been set up including Senior Management, IT, HR, comms and members of emergency services. First meeting at 7am
Building had police cordon because no one knew why and if other buildings would be targeted
Back up tapes needed but there was only only one key to the safe which was on someone desk which had been destroyed in fire! Rang locksmith to break into safe. Had them before equipment had turned up

Existing infrastructure in building configured for use
DR plans checked so people know what to do
Equipment delivered to remote site by 11am
Set up equipment, rebuild of restore server.
Initial run of back up tapes, found problems with tape drive. Thought back up tapes were damaged :-(
Wasted several hours. But had been sent wrong type of tape drive. So had to get new one. But lost a day
Shared bandwidth with Oxford CC to get access to Internet and set up some temporary web sites

7pm, sent everyone home to rest.

Friday

New tape drive delivered and restores started.
Contacted key suppliers and asked for help where needed. Suppliers offered engineers etc. accepted all help.
Emergency laptops purchased to get frontline staff working. Housing staff especially as they dealt with vulnerable people, they used a hosted application. Bought Staff mobile phones.
Lot of laptops and mobiles lost in fire
Old XP machines used for temporary desktops.
Put up temporary web sites to give public information and key things they needed.

Saturday

Restore fully underway of key systems and data bases. Was an issue getting AD back
Had regular meetings of the team throughout the process
Migrated mail to Office 365. Needed to get mail working, was about to do it anyway so had licences, scripted process to automate user creation. Within 2 hours had fully functioning email system, through a browser. Didn't restore legacy system.
Building laptop image for use on Monday.
Live websites back up by Sunday night
Over weekend had an issues with available storage space for VMfarm.

Monday onwards

Limited number of desks, so only limited space, had to improvise!
Initiated VDI project to replace desktops. Had a new desktop within a week. A week!!!
All system and data recovery completed by Wednesday.
Challenge then was to get rest of business working.
Buy buy buy, build, build build
bought New laptops, thin clients, replacement physical servers. Built new desktops and laptops
Issues.

• Limited office space, staff had to work in rotas.
  
• Expectation of people about how long it would take to recover, assumption it would just happen
  
• Out of hours support for emergency changes, some providers didn't provide out of hours support.
  

Challenges

• Needed to minimise impact on services to the public
  
• Deliver major elections, largest set of elections for 30 years
  
• Office accommodation for staff. Leased some space, brought some old buildings back into play
  
• Communications to staff on what was happening, regular briefings in local town hall.
  

Where are they now?

• Just moved into new offices
  
• Still running on DR equipment.
  
• Impact on projects, lots of delays
  

Lessons

• Test your plans
  
• Be prepared to change plans, eg move to office 365
  
• Never assume anything, like there's a spare key!
  

Other points
Out of news after 2 days, so consider it. Success
25m insurance bill!
Video of damage, lot of damage not done by fire but water and smoke.
Had to do full data destruction process on all kit damaged

Really great case study.
.

Posted with Blogsy

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.

Keep calm and call control...

Quick wrap up of things I've been doing this week.  As well as meeting Faculties, I've chaired a meeting of our Business Continuity Operations Group where we looked at a number things including how we respond to student occupations of our buildings, what emergency procedures the city has in place which might affect us, and a review of our major incident plan. We have a really good set of web pages about what to do in an incident, which everyone should be familiar with, and a neat little poster:

I've also taken part in a forum of Heads of Academic Departments and Director of Professional Services about how we should interact both with the University executive Board 9UEB), and with each other. Some very interesting discussions, and a general view that the current UEB/HoDS forum doesn't work well and can be improved. A set of recommendations will follow....

Finally, this morning I had a conference call with other members of the Steering Group for one of the JISC Co-Design projects which is looking improving the digital skills of staff in HE.   It's title is Building capability for new digital leadership, pedagogy and efficiency, and you can read more about it here. The project intends to provide clear guidance over what digital skills are required, and equip leaders and staff with the tools and resources they need to improve digital capability at a local or institutional level. This will cover all areas of the University - technology enhanced learning, Administrative processes, and research.

Keep calm, and go to the fairground....

Today it was our Business Continuity Operations Group where we looked at a number of things, including some new web pages to let people know what to do in case of an incident. We also signed off the Business Impact Assessment templates that are going to be rolled out across the University to help departments with their business continuity planning by getting them to think about what they actually do, and what the impact would be of them not being able to do it. We also looked at some very helpful case studies written very honestly by Universities which had suffered incidents rangin from earthquakes, to fires, to evacuating student residences because of potential flooding. Lots of learning points, especailly around disruprion to learning and teaching, and the importance of good crisis communications.


Tonight I went to the opening of Marvelosa, an exhibition in Library of original art inspired by The
National Fairground Archive which celebrates 20 years this year. There were wonderful works by Pete McKee: 

 and Anthony Bennett - this sculpture was my favourite.

Definitely worth a visit  - open to the general public until 8 January.

What you looking at?

Nice long weekend away to start the week - camping. And yes, it did rain.

We've been thinking about Business Continuity Planning this week, and what it means to CiCS. Normally as Chair of the University Business Continuity Operations Group I think about what it means to the University, but this time we were thinking much closer to home. For the major systems we provide to the University its something we do as a matter of course, we build resilience, reliability, duplication, mirroring, failover, data storage and back up into almost everything we do. But there's a lot of other services we provide to the University, and other functions involved in keeping us as a department running that we need take another look at.

Yesterday I was at a UCISA Executive meeting where we talked a lot about the changes that are happening to UCISA  including changes to its charitable status and the establishment of a trading company. All very complex and I'm glad there are people on the committee who understand it!  A lot of other topics discussed, including a joint initiative between ourselves and Educause to look at the skills needed for a moden day CIO, and the continuation of our initiative on Action Learning Sets for Deputy and Assistant Directors. We also touched on our relationship with JISC and some of the changes happening there. The JISC funded Summer of Student Innovation, has been a success again with nearly 40 ideas  submitted, and voting on them is still open - get over there and vote for your favourite project.  UCISA are looking at doing something similar for staff which I'm sure will be equally as successful. I was also able to report that planning for the next UCISA Conference is going well, with 4 top class speakers already confirmed, and I'm awaiting responses from others.

In other news, our peregrine falcon chicks continue to grow, and have started to balance precariously on the edge of the nest and flap their wings. They're starting to look a little cuter now they're preending the scraggly down away. They're also rather curious!

The falcons are back

This week we've had a liaison meeting with our colleagues from the Library. Talked about a range of issues including Digital Preservation and identity management, as well as the future of our Virtual Learning Environment. That last one is an interesting question - will large, fairly monolithic software packages continue to dominate the VLE space, or will a variety of solutions exist, loosely connected into an environment for students to access learning materials? We already know that Google apps and YouTube are being used, and there's a number of other services emerging. Will be interesting to see what happens.

I also chaired a Business Continuity Operations Group - this is a group which looks at BC for the whole University and has representation from Professional Services and Faculties. We have a big work programme which we're gradually working through, and a pilot of Business Impact Assessments in departments is coming to a close, and will shortly be rolled out across the University. This will help departments with reviewing their BC plans, and also when updating their risk registers. Many of the actions in our work programme are the result of either reviews of real incidents (a recent fire is a good case in point), or simulated incidents. We hold these at a University level, and also for individual departments or groups of departments. I suspect its getting close to us having an IT simulated one, although we seem to get enough real ones to keep us on our toes. A rather devious ransomware attack is keeping some of us busy at the moment.....

And some good news - we're about to launch our new Creative Media Room for staff. It compliments the great facilities we have already for students, and everyone's welcome to drop in and see it next Friday between 1200 and 1400.

And finally, as its Friday - a picture of one of our Peregrine Falcons,  who've returned to the nesting platform.  Not sure if it's George or Mildred. You can keep a lookout for them here, and follow them on twitter (@peregrines2014), where a motion sensor on the camera should send you a tweet when they land.

Push here....

I think everyone's trying to get the last round of meeting's in before Christmas - almost back to back ones for the last couple of days. Work is really starting to get in the way of preparing for Christmas :-)  Although I am pleased to see the decorations starting to appear in our building. One room is particularly spectacular - the one with Santa's runway. You know who you re.

Yesterday I chaired a meeting of our Incident Contacts project board where we're developing phase 2 of the system which will store departmental contacts, as well as all business continuity and incident management information, and links to information about fire marshals and first aiders. We also had a meeting to discuss how we might handle accounts and email addresses for our students when they leave us. there are various options that our move to Google gives us, all with pros and cons, so we need to think carefully moving forward.

We also had a Service Strategy Board meeting, where we looked at progress on projects, and our 'business as usual" work that doesn't fall into the category of a project. Unfortunately in some areas, this work has seriously impacted on other work which we hoped to carry out. I posted the other day about issues we have been having with our PC booking software and how we have had to turn it off, but this is nothing to the problems we've been having with another of our systems - our VLE. We've been plagued by problems since the beginning of semester, and despite working closely with our suppliers to fix, it is taking so much effort away from other things. We can only apologise to our staff and students. Lets hope normal service will soon be resumed - for all our sakes. It is so inconvenient to our customers, and so frustrating for us.

Today some catch ups and HR stuff, and then a meeting of our Professional Services Executive which took place in the University's new restaurant - Inox Dine. Open all day and evening, Monday to Friday, and open to the public,  I recommend it. We had two main items for discussion - one was the announcement in the autumn statement that the cap on student numbers was going to be lifted, and what that will mean for us, We also touched on how the government was going to afford it, but that's another story!

But, the most exciting item for discussion was the launch of the University's new web site. Sent live this afternoon, it's the result of a great collaboration between Corporate Affairs and colleagues in CiCS. I think it looks great, well done to everyone involved. Oh and if you wondered how we send things live.....

Keep calm

Monday was our Business Continuity Steering Group where we caught up on all things BC related, including Phase 2 of our incident contacts system where we'll be developing it to be used by departments to store all of their staff contact details and BC plans. We also looked at a number of procedures that we've been documenting in the light of various incidents and exercises including using our student accommodation in the event of a major incident, and evacuating buildings in an emergency that's not a fire. That's more complicated than you think! We've also produced a handy little fold-out card telling you what to do in an incident - which is summed up by Keep Calm and Call Control.

At the moment I'm at the UCISA CISG conference, primarily to have some meetings relating to next year's main conference which is being held in the same venue. I'm on the Conference Organising Committee, and with such a big and prestigious conference its important to get every detail right if you want to keep attracting delegates. Its is the little things that can make people enjoy, or not, a conference. The quality of the coffee gets as many comments as the quality of the speakers! Being at  a conference in the same venue means that we can check these details out. For the first time last night I was involved with choosing the menu for the gala dinner, which involved trying 6 starters, 6 main courses and 3 desserts. I wasn't very hungry this morning.

Back to work

Back at work this week after an amazing holiday in Jamaica - not normally away at this time of year, but last year we got hit by Hurricane Sandy, and they offered us a free holiday to make up for it. It would have been rude to say no.

Interesting to watch  business continuity plans swing into operation on our way out - we were at Gatwick when they suffered a power cut which brought their computer systems down. People with loud hailers appeared telling people what gate to go to, all tickets were checked manually, and although we were lucky and got on the plane, just after the cut, our bags weren't so lucky. Each one taken out of the container by the side of the plane and manually checked against a list. three and a half hours later, we took off. Interesting to see how a complex organisation can cope without its systems, but so much slower.

Some good news to get back to as for the third year running Sheffield's topped the list in the student barometer for student satisfaction for IT Support - I'll post more detail when I have it, but well done everyone.

Spent most of this week catching up, and also gave a telephone interview to a journalist about the changing role of the CIO as technology changes. I always out the phone down after these and think "what did I say?" Well, I hope it makes an interesting read when it comes out. It's always fun seeing how journalists interpret what you say.
 Here's the result of the last one I did. Bears some resemblance to what I remember saying :-)

Other things this week include a catch up with our finance manager about our budget, and some discussions about the data issues around a research proposal.

It was also Senate - our academic governing body -  where we had some really interesting debate around changes to our curriculum structure. Also about the environment we're in at the moment - there's constant change, there's no HE Bill so we're being ruled by a series of ministerial statements, and the "GoveEffect"is affecting everything about our admissions.  And our Vice Chancellor quoted Russell Brand when talking about immigration!

So, as it's Halloween, here's a scary fact to finish on from our comms team - our students print 5.6m pages a year.

Start of term.....

After a morning of meetings, Friday lunchtime was spent celebrating the 50th Anniversary of our Information School. Founded in 1963 as a Postgraduate School of Librarianship with only 3 full time staff, it's now one of an international group of world leading iSchools. There were staff and students there from almost every year of the school - great to see some faces from the past.

I spent some of the weekend working on the Mobile University - a great event of about 30 mini lectures delivered on a vintage bus. The sun shone, and it was very popular with some lectures packed, both on the bus and in the tent where we had the overflow.  We even had deckchairs!

Today started with a Business Continuity Operational Group, where we discussed Business Impact Assessments, Evacuation procedures and a debrief of a recent incident involving a fire!

Today we had a visit from a facilitator who'll be working with us on an awayday for our Service Strategy Board in a few weeks. Discussed what we might cover, and what we wanted to get out of it.

And, we dealt with an incident, (which still has people working on it now as I type this) where we had to take a system down for a while because of performance problems. Unfortunately, it still isn't quite right.  System interruptions are thankfully rare, but when they happen they are very disruptive, especially on the first day of term. I'm really grateful to the people who work so hard trying to deal with them, from the people trying to fix them to the ones dealing with our staff and students.

Incidents and teenage birds

This morning I chaired a review of the major incident we had last Friday.  Something we always do - it's important to uncover what happened, and learn from any mistakes that have been made, look at what we can do better, and what worked well. In this particular case there are quire a few lessons to learn, around a number of aspects including our communication channels, incident procedures and change management processes.  We were piloting a new internal chat system, HipChat, when the incident happened, so it got a good test and it looks as though it will prove very useful.

We also had an Exec meeting where we looked at how we cover for the University Business Continuity Manager, (who is based in CiCS) if she is unavailable during an incident. As an Incident Manager I'm already trained in the major incident plan, and our three Assistant Directors are about to be so they they can also provide help and advice.

Finally tonight I went to a talk about the Peregrine falcons who are nesting on a platform on St George's Church and have hatched three chicks. The chair of the Sheffield Bird Study group gave a fascinating insight into these beautiful birds and their history. I hadn't realised how nearly wiped out they'd been by gamekeepers and pesticides, with only 385 pairs in the UK in 1961. Then we heard from our EFM department who had built and installed the platform - when originally constructed it had been on the opposite side of the church, due to concerns from the council about damage to the listed building, but after 20 months no bird had been near it. After permission had been gained to move it to its current position in 2011, the falcons landed on it straight away, and have been there on and off since. We also heard about the webcam, which was installed by EFM and we now look after the streaming. It's had over 280,000 hits from over 100 different countries. When the birds have flown, the platform will come down ( wouldn't like to go anywhere near it - it's disgusting at the moment), and be remade by AMRC from a composite material, and we'll also be looking at developing the webcam (s) for next year.

The chicks started off cute - now they look like teenagers - fairly dirty, messy, slightly gawky. I'm sure they'll be cute again when they've grown up - which apparently will only take a few more days. They're definitely getting interested in the outside world now, and see what I mean about the nest?

We are the best......

Another feedback meeting today  - this time from the Student Barometer and International Student barometer survey carried out just before Christmas.  Last year we did really well and this year it was always going to be difficult to follow that, but I'm really pleased to say that we almost did. For International Students IT Support had a 95% satisfaction rate, which put us top of the Russell Group and 8th in the UK. For domestic students, we had a 96% satisfaction rating, which put us top of the Russell Group, top in the UK, and top of the wider survey which includes some international Universities. A clean sweep - well done to everyone.  There were some other outstanding scores, including for the Student Union and SSiD, our Student Services Information Desk. As always, some areas were identified which need improvement, but that's why we take part - to find out what they are and rectify them

Also today we had the final project meeting before the go-live of our Incident Contacts System which will be a simple, efficient way of collecting, storing and retrieving contact details of people who might be needed in an incident. It has no dependencies on other systems, and a copy is hosted off site in case our service/network is down. The only problem with it is, it is so good, all of the pilot departments who've used it want to use it for other things which are outside of the scope of the existing project, so Phase 2 is about to be born!

Hashtags and silliness

Business Continuity Operations Group this morning (BCOG), where most of the business arose out of the recent exercise we carried out. We're particularly focusing now on getting departments to carry out Business Impact Assessments, and write their BC plans to fit in with them. Also some procedures we need to clarify - we spent some time discussing how to evacuate a building when there isn't a fire, so you cant use the fire alarms. An interesting one. Run round with a loud hailer shouting "GET OUT" was one suggestion. At the end of BCOG we always go round the table and note down Incidents and Near-Misses. This can cover everything from a power outage in the student residences, to bad weather, to a serious student illness,  to systems related incidents.

We were pleased to report that this morning we'd had a "near miss", (not a good description), and not an incident. Tuesday night we had a serious hardware failure on one of our filers. Failover to the other one worked perfectly, but as we were then vunerable and running at risk we decided we had to repair it asap. Parts were brought up by the engineer yesterday afternoon, and taking into account what exams were being held and when, and availability of staff, an emergency CAB yesterday decided to do the work early this morning. We thought it was low risk  - but obviously very high impact - if the filers didn't come back properly we would lose many systems. However, we decided the risk was higher after the engineer told us that they'd only done this twice before, and it had failed both times. Cue the taking down of our VLE, increased resistance on the web site, more people around, an earlier start time and  ----  a hashtag!!

I woke up early, and with myiPhone under the bedcovers followed the progress of #fixthefiler (sorry to everyone else who'd got up at unearthly hours to come in). We're very lucky  that nearly everyone involved tweets, so I got a running commentary, and all the banter that goes with it. There was some debate about the value of a hashtag, and we felt it definitely increases the team spirit - as well as keeping the people who follow us amused. Our official twitter feed tweeted regular updates, and everything went swimmingly well, apart from a mysterious orange light which appeared on one of the filers. But, the VLE and other things we'd taken down as a precaution were brought back, and the team had done a great job. But, there was more to come. In order that they could keep an eye on the mysterious orange light, a webcam was pointed at the server, and a new hashtag was born - #filercam. For most of the day, some of us have had a screen open showing a filer with a small orange light on it. Quite hypnotic, but also very silly. Social media is now an integrated part of our communications, and is so valuable, but its good that it can also be a bit silly at time. We all need a bit of fun in our lives.

Let it snow....

Yesterday I was at a RUGIT meeting - IT Directors of the Russell Group Universities. We talked about a number of things, including setting up a couple of new Special Interest Groups - one on open access publishing, and one on research support.  We also had quite an interesting discussion about  strategies, and the different approaches taken. Some have traditional IT Strategies - usually 3-5 year rolling plans written by the IT department and mainly about central IT. Others, especially where all IT is run by one department, have whole University strategies. One had a quite short, infrastructure strategy written by the IT Department, with the rest contained in departmental plans. Here in sheffield we are developing strategies for our service areas, so we have a Teaching and Learning Support Strategy, a Research Support Strategy, one for Communication and Collaboration,  Help and Support, Corporate Information, Business Activity and Infrastructure.

Everyone seemed to be struggling with the same problem - too much to do and not enough resources. Too many requests for work coming in and unrealistic expectations of what we can cope with, and  how long it might take. We're not the only place having issues with prioritisation either, and a distinct lack of services that we can stop offering in order to develop and run new ones.

Today has mostly been about snow. As chair of BCOG, (Business Continuity Operational Group), I often end up coordinating the University's response to events such as bad weather. Today we were making sure that our snow clearing and gritting teams were prepared, we had communications for staff and students, and that we were prepared to get venues ready for exams over the weekend and next week. We have a great weather adviser from the met office who keeps us up to date with the latest predictions. As I write this, we've had light snow for a couple of hours, but nothing serious so far.

Signing off for a week now - my annual pilgrimage to Center Parcs for a birthday treat - lots of sitting in the hot tub drinking cocktails I hope, even if it snows.

Handshakes and planning

So, the graduation ceremonies went well, the handshake videos are up (excellent quality), and the gigapixel pictures are there and being tagged.

Today we had our first snowfall of the winter, on the day exams started. So, we dusted off and updated our web page, made sure we had excellent gritting and clearing arrangements in place, and reminded everyone where to go for information. We're not letting a bit of snow be a crisis!

This afternoon it was Service Strategy Board (SSB), no project reports this month so we focused on the highlight reports from our service managers. Lots of non project work going on, but a lot to do with more requests for work than we can deliver, so we will be working with departments to prioritise. We took a look at our development portfolio and agreed to completely review our benefit profiles and set up a departmental risk group to review our various risk registers and bring them together.

We've also started looking at our planning statement for next year which we'll be completing after we've met all of the Faculties. Some themes coming out after the first few meetings - more, bigger computer rooms for teaching and assessment, and more wireless across campus. Neither of these will come cheap, so we'll be having a close look at our budgets.

Back to work and virtual humans

Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to 2013 - hope you all had a good break. I'm sure 2013 will be another successful year for us - lots to do, and we also welcome our new Assistant Director, Dave Surtees, who started with us today.

When we got back last week it was straight into a 9am meeting of the Steering group overseeing the review of our student system. We're looking at what we currently have, as well as a vision for the future,  but the emphasis is increasingly on process change, simplification and standardisation.

I've had a meeting with HR about the Equality Objectives project I was involved in last year, and particularly how we can change the way we recruit staff so that we more closely reflect the local population. Lots of things to try out, and an interesting pilot is soon to start for some of our ancillary staff.

This morning we had a Business Continuity Operational Group, where the main agenda item was looking at the recommendations coming out of the exercise I took part in before Christmas, where we had three teams working on three different simulated incidents.

Finally today, I and some colleagues went to talk to one of our academic research institutes, INISIGNEO. This is a really exciting initiative - joint research involving departments in the Faculties of Engineering and Medicine. They are using computer simulation and modelling techniques to predict changes in the physiological state of a person. For example the progression of a disease, or of treatment. They are building biological models of organ systems which will eventually complete the virtual physiological human. This is all very exciting (there's a press release about it here), and of course, it requires computing power, hence our discussions with them. We'll be working with them to make sure they get the right sort of processing power, and the necessary training and support. It's one of the reasons I love working in a University, listening to academics who are passionate about their research.

Keep Calm and Call Control

A week of catch up meetings and Christmas lunches, including the infamous CiCS Christmas party. Photos will be posted as soon as I've decided where to host them!

Today we gave our customers some Christmas reading and published our newsletter, which you can download here.

The article on our new major incident plan caused some amusement, and a rather good mock up what a poster advertising it might look like was soon mocked up by one of our twitter readers (thanks James...).  Lots of good articles in there including ones on our new desktop, migration to our new VLE, information security, research computing and using Google Apps in teaching. We produce this about twice a year, and an email one every month. You can see all of our back copies here.

So, that's it for a couple of weeks. Have a very Happy Christmas and may you all have health, peace and happiness in the New Year. See you in 2013.

Space, SSB and George

Early start yesterday for a UEB/HoDS meeting (I should include a glossary shouldn't I - University Executive Board, Heads of Departments). One of the main discussion items was Space. I have to resist the temptation to always add The Final Frontier.  Specifically teaching space. Have we got enough, do we need to use it better?
Lots of data provided, including the different patterns of teaching (Monday mornings and Friday afternoons aren't popular), and the number of rooms booked which aren't used.  Discussions centred around how we can change our systems to improve efficiency of use, and what cultures need to change. Lots of very constructive discussion ranging from central timetabling to extending the teaching day. Lots more discussion to come as we cannot keep building more space.

Also yesterday we had a Business Continuity Steering Group where we  had a demo of our new Incident Contacts system, and a debrief of the incident simulation of a couple of weeks ago. Some headlines coming out of it include the need for "sub plans" to have in case of an incident - how do we evacuate a building safely without using fire alarms for example, or how do we cancel and rearrange exams. 

Then yesterday afternoon was our Service Strategy Board. As usual, a full meeting. In fact all meetings yesterday were full, not one less than two hours. But, all useful and interesting. SSB had a presentation on our Incident Procedure which has been revamped. Some of the key points to come out of the discussion included:

• Front line support are a vital part of the process. We need to integrate the helpdesk and service catalogue, and complete our  Service Level Agreements (SLA's).
• We discussed target resolution time for typical low-medium-high level problems which will be in the SLAs
• We're introducing more regular reporting on incidents and the following reviews
• One of the major areas of discussion was around out of hours incidents which are often the hardest to manage. Our new  incident contact database will help but we do have an issue with customer expectations of  24/7 suppor.
• Major incidents will continue to be  handled by a team, with an identified incident co-ordinator, working with the University incident management plan as appropriate. 
• We also noted that the Service Manager for the area is key to strategic decisions and needs to be involved in all incident teams.

A good discussion and the revised plan will now be subject to further consultation before being finalised in the New Year when we'll start a period of training and awareness raising. 

Lots of other good stuff in the Service Managers highlight reports and project progress documents. I was pleased to note the continuing success of the creative media suite in the IC, and a recent session for 40 students in the production of creative media was fully booked within hours. You can read about in the IC blog here.
We looked at several new project proposals and approved one of them - which can be summarised as Getting out of uSpace  (uSpace is our collaboration software which we hope to be out of by end of next year).  Others will be subject to further discussion and prioritisation.

And the most exciting thing to happen yesterday - I adopted a new cat. George. He's huge and furry. Does he look like a maine coon to anyone?

epiGenesys Showcase

On Monday i went to the 5th anniversary and student showcase of epiGenesys. epiGenesys is a business set up by the University's department of Computer Science in late 2007. It's wholly owned by the University, employing Sheffield graduates and giving  experience to current students on IT projects for businesses and charities, as well as ourselves. It's a great set up and has been hugely successful. We saw some really interesting projects, including a secure way of storing committee papers and displaying them on an iPad, a bibliographic search tool for researchers, a web interface to local hospital radio for patients and relatives to make requests and a PAT testing system. There were lots more, but I didn't have time to get round them all. A great venture, and something we are becoming more involved with - to mutual benefit I hope. We are commissioning epiGenesys to write systems for us, and I hope we will be able to give students some experience of what it's like to work in a large, enterprise organisation.

One of the systems epiGenesys has been working with us on is our incident contacts system, which we are piloting at the moment. Updatable by individual staff who've been nominated by their department to be incident contacts, it gives a nice clean search interfaces for our security staff to find contacts by name, department, building, role etc. The project group met this morning, and we're hopeful that after the pilot departments have reported we can roll it out across the University.