Risky decisions

Another couple of all day workshops this week. The  Executive team (me and the 3 Assistant Directors) took ourselves off to do some work on a couple of important topics. First was Risk. managing risk is extremely important to us - deciding which risks we're prepared to take, which we need to mitigate, and which we can ignore. We need to keep and maintain a risk register, and have risk management plans in place. We've already done a lot of work in the department on this, but this was a chance for us to look at it in some detail. To get a fell for the type and range of risks we need to manage, we each came up with as many different risks as we could think of, using post it notes (of course). The we tried to group them into categories. Won't go into all the details, but the range of risks was very interesting - 'technical"risks were just one category out of about 13 including reputational, political, staffing, regulatory and supplier risks. We also mapped them onto a heat map - plotting impact against probability. Like this, which given the lack of things in the top right implied we were either complacent, or had our calibration wrong.

All fairly standard stuff in risk management terms, but we then used this to start to write a risk strategy, and identify risk management plans.

We spent the second day looking at our decision making process - what sort of decisions we take, where are they taken (and more importantly, where should they be taken), and how we can make the whole thing more transparent. Adopted a similar process and had a brainstorm of the types of decision we take - everything from where to go for the Christmas party to deciding our strategic priorities :-)  Used this to categorise them, look at where they are and should be taken, and began to draw up a decision matrix.

More on both of the above later as we develop the ideas and share them with the department.

December round up

Myself and the Assistant Directors went away for a couple of days last week. to look at two main items. First was an analysis of how we interact with our major stakeholders, whether we have it right, and what can we do to improve it. Before we went we did a survey of some of our senior stakeholders, and their responses were extremely useful. We got some very good feedback, and some that was more constructive :-) What was obvious were some big differences in different parts of the University. We used the following grid to map our stakeholders which plots how much power and influence people have, and how interested they are in our services. It was quite illuminating :-)

I'm not sure I agree with some of the labels, but it did show us where we were not engaging appropriately in some areas. So, we've come up with a plan which we are putting in place in the new year.

The other big discussion we had was about the future shape of the department, something that we've been looking at for a while. I use the phrase shape, rather than structure deliberately. We're looking at how we can improve our planning and architecture, the design and building of services, transitioning them then into delivery. I am keen to get it right rather than do it quickly, so a lot more discussion still to be had.

I also attended an open forum with the Vice Chancellor, other members of UEB and a selection of staff from across the institution. This was one of a series of workshops as part of the consultation on our strategic plan, and was about Our Strategic Partners. Some good presentation and lively discussion about what partnership meant, who we should partner with, and who we shouldn't.

Almost my final meeting was Senate Budget Committee (SBC) where I represent the Professional Services, and we had our annual meeting with the Vice Chancellor. SBC looks at the budgetary processes in the University, and we were discussing with the VC what its future role should be. SBC makes public all of its discussions, and has a webpage of very useful resources about University finances.

Planning, stakeholders and Netflix

For the last couple of days I've been on an awayday with the rest of my colleagues in our executive team. once or twice a year we try and get away from the campus to have a look at various strategic things which need some quality time, away from interruptions. This year we looked at several themes.
The first was how we plan and how we might develop Strategic Themes to help us focus on what our objectives are in each area. We looked at a number of themes we might want to adopt including:
Achieving operational excellence
Delivering an excellent customer experience
Working in partnership with the University to ensure it meets its strategic objectives
Implementing innovative solutions
When we've identified what our themes are, we could draw up a strategy map for each of our service areas, which should make defining our objectives much easier. It is definitely something to consider.

Another area we looked at was stakeholder management. Stakeholders are anyone who is affected by our work, anyone who contributes to our work, any entity which can affect our work, anyone working internally contributing to the delivery of our work.  We have a lot!  We tried looking at them from a number of different angles, including using a couple of matrices. I blogged about one a couple of weeks ago:

 Which had the interesting conclusion that you should not waste time on "enemies" - merely neutralise the damage they can do and ignore them. That's sort of counter intuitive, as you would think that you need to put more effort into them.  The one we worked on was this one:

 where we mapped groups of people and individuals according to how much power they had, and the degree of interest they had in us or individual projects. Some very interesting results, and a list of actions about how we might put a plan in place to move people more towards the top right.

The  third thing we looked at was our service portfolio, where we've been doing some work on how we might realign some of our services to make them more readily understandable to our customers, especially senior ones. This led to discussions on how it fitted with the broader themes of service management, especially service design and service delivery, and we have a number of actions and consultations there.

Finally, we looked at customer service, including the output and feedback from our recent customer service conference. One of the things we want to do is walk the customer journey for a few services, and identify customer touch points. then identify what excellence would look like at each touch point and whether we're delivering it or not.

As usual, a lot of work, and a lot of actions, which we're busy writing up and allocating at the moment.

Finally, during the awayday we looked at a presentation from Netflix which their HR director gave to their staff about their  attitude to talent and culture. If you search around on the web you'll find the video, but the slide deck is here, and that's all you really need.
I like how they reward adequate performance....

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?

Exec go away

Every year me and the Assistant Directors ( aka "The Exec") try and get away for a day and a half to have space to think about things. This year we've just completed it, and one of the things we used as a basis for discussion was a survey we carried out quickly last week about how our colleagues in CiCS perceive our services, and how satisfied they are with certain aspects of their role.

As usual we had a wide ranging discussion about many things, including excellence in customer service, where we had a look at Customer Service Excellence, the government standard for customer service. Under the five headings of Customer insight, the Culture of the Organisation, Information and Access, Delivery and Timeliness and Quality of Service, it looks to provide a useful framework for self assessments, and I think we will carry out a gap analysis to see if there's anything we're not doing that we should be.

Other things we looked at included effective decision making, and how we can convey our decision making process better to the department and explain why certain decisions are made. This morning we looked particularly at staff engagement, and our survey results showed that in general we do a good job, but there are pockets we need to improve.

A very intensive but extremely useful couple of days, with a long action list coming out of it.

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Money, it's a gas...

Started yesterday walking my short journey to work listening to Pink Floyd. Our CFO and me are doing a double act at the UCISA Management Conference in March giving our own perspectives on what a Finance Department wants from an IT department, and what they get or should expect. As there is a connection between our CFO and Pink Floyd, there's some lyrics we might try and weave in. "Money" for example....

Yesterday afternoon the VC came to see us - spent well over an hour chatting with the Executive Team about a whole variety of issues - what we perceive our role to be, how we're supporting the University, what our vision and aspirations are, and what could be done differently to make a difference. A great chat, lots of support for our ideas and lots to take forward.

Later in the afternoon we had a bit of a brainstorm about what our vision of a future Student System is.  Might be a new one, might be development of the one we've got, but we need a vision to sit above the functionality we're looking for. You have to be a bit careful that it doesn't look like a game of buzzword bingo, but we came up with a number of key words which will get woven into a vision statement - student centric, mobile, flexible, user friendly, integrated with other systems (including social media), enabling.

One of the best things about today was a demonstration of some ideas for our new portal to me and the rest of the Exec. All good stuff and quite exciting that we seem to be getting somewhere. Now we need to work on further consultation, and timescales to get something to replace our existing portal by the start of the new academic session.

In other news, filercam is still showing an orange light, Yoda  put in an appearance last week to see if he could help, but couldn't.

And, you might have read about twitter accounts being hacked over the weekend, 250,000 of them. I thought at first that it was more than that, as myself and quite a few friends had been affected, but apparently it targeted early users who'd signed up in 2007.  Anyway, twitter was full of tweets from people like me who had to change their password - so how did the Sunday Telegraph find and pick mine?

Back.....

Straight back into the swing of things today after a great break in the snow. Strategic Liaison meeting with the Faculty of Engineering. Shared our plans and priorities for the next 2/3 years, and talked about some common concerns. Issues around timetabling and teaching space, the VLE,  the managed desktop and data storage and research computing support all had a lively discussion. Also had some very productive discussion about working closer together, especially around servers - virtual and physical ones.

Had an Exec meeting this afternoon where we had our first look at the results of a recent staff survey. Only got them this morning, but on first glance, some useful information. Some areas where we're doing well, some areas to improve and do better in. Some services well liked, some not so. We'll be working over the next few weeks analysing the results and coming up with an action plan. We also agreed to change the oversight of our risk registers, and set up a new Risk Management Group.

Most of the rest of day spent catching up - with emails and chatting to real people. The latter is one of the best things about coming back to work, which is more than can be said for the former.

Secret Sheffield

Yesterday morning was mainly taken up with an Exec meeting where we were looking at the implications for us of some of our Faculty's plans, especially in terms of student number targets. We also worked through our operational plans looking at where priorities might need to be adjusted to take account of changing University objectives.

In the afternoon I was at a meeting of PSE ( Professional Service Executive) where we discussed a number of topics, including the first thoughts of our new Director of Corporate Affairs, (Nick), who joined us a few weeks ago. Lots of interesting debate around our brand, how we are perceived and what we aspire to be as a University. For example, what does it mean to be a civic university, is it just a descriptor of the sort of University we are, or does it have a much deeper meaning about how we interact with the City? A generally held opinion, and one picked up early by Nick, is that we have lots of excellent stuff going on, but we tend to keep it a secret, in true Yorkshire fashion, we don't like to brag about it :-)

I personally was pleased to see a much greater commitment to Digital Engagement emerging, and I look forward to working with Nick and his team on this strategy.

Today I'm off to London for a presentation on how the CPS have implemented their T3 ((Transformation Through Technology) programme where they plan to make the whole criminal justice system paperless. I've been reading up in it, and it hasn't been without its problems, so I'm looking forward to hearing how they've done, and what we can learn from it.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Getting to know you, incidents and blogs

Last week we had an awayday for our Executive team - me and the Assistant Directors, including our new one, Dave, who starts with us in January. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other, our preference styles for working, and how we might work together as a team, identifying where we had common strengths and weaknesses, and where they might complement each other. We also had a look at some of the feedback we've had on the results of our recent staff satisfaction survey. We'll be drawing up a staff engagement strategy and implementation plan over the next few weeks to address some of the areas we need to improve.

Today I've been at a major incident exercise. I could be called upon to be University Incident Manager or on the Incident Management Team if we had a major incident, and today we had three teams of people playing a variety of roles ( for example Incident Manager, Gold Liaison Officer, Duty Manager, communications officer) managing three different incidents. These were not purely table top exercises, but done in real time, with real time information provided, and real communications and actions being drawn up. Our incident involved an unexploded bomb, a very large exclusion zone, evacuation of buildings, disruption to exams, and the threat of a power shutdown to a major science block. All quite tiring and stressful to deal with, especially as more and more information hits you, which it would do in real life. Essential that we keep testing and refine our plans, and our ability to use them, even though we hope we don't have to use them!

I was also sent this link to a list of HE technical blogs by the Guardian Higher Education Network on twitter, and although I'm quite chuffed to be included, it's worth a look to see some excellent resources there for the community.

Influencing, horse whispering and segways

Must be the season for awaydays - this week is was our Executive Team - me and the 3 Assistant Directors. We try and get away together once a year for some quality time. This year we took forward some of the things raised last week at our SSB awayday, especially around governance, prioritisation and feedback loops. The other big area we looked at was influencing skills - how can we use different techniques to increase our influence in the University, and how can we improve our relationships with our key stakeholders. Lots of work done, a very useful time and more importantly, lots to do now we're back.

Yesterday evening, as part of looking at different skill sets, we watched a film, Buck. It was a documentary about a horse trainer, Buck Brannaman who was the inspiration behind the film the Horse Whisperer.  A survivor of serious child abuse, he is now a horse trainer, using techniques based on an understanding of how horses think and communicate to train the horse to accept humans and work confidently and responsively with them. It was a brilliant, very moving film, and we used it as a basis for lots of discussion on rapport, empathy, negotiation, feedback and other skills. Well worth a watch. Have the hankies ready!

We also try and do something a bit fun, as we encourage other teams to do on their awaydays. This time we had a go on Segways. A couple of us had tried them before, but these were off road ones, and we spent an hour at lunchtime today in the pouring rain speeding round the hotel grounds going through potholes, puddles, woodland.  Interesting the amount of protective clothing they made us wear - overalls, kneepads, elbowpads, body protection jacket, full helmet - compared to the simple bicycle helmet we wore last time! A little OTT I think, but great fun anyway. I know I've said this before, but they really are amazing feats of engineering

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.

SSB, Exec and mobile coverage

Service Strategy Board today, and a catch up on all of our projects and Service Advisory Groups. As we approach the time of year where new stuff goes live, there's an understandable nervousness about whether stuff is going to be ready. One of the big projects is the Enquirer and Applicant Portal, which will handle much of the registration process this year. Lots of people working hard on it, and it will be a huge improvement on current processes. Big discussion on allocation of resources to projects, and where we can find more!

Exec meeting this morning where we had a look at the recommendations from our mobile survey, and the latest draft of the booklet explaining our services for new students. We also had a discussion about whether we should be looking at accreditation by the NCC - there's a number of case studies here, and the ones from JANET and Imperial College are particularly relevant. They obviously found it useful, and it's something we'll consider, but only if there are benefits.

Finally, I was interested to see this morning that the BBC is attempting to map mobile phone coverage in the UK using an Android app which collects information about 2G and 3G availability. It's the first time an independent map has been produced - it will be interesting to see the results. If my experience is anything to go by, there will be some big gaps!

Scenario planning and baking with cats

Last week I spent two days with the other members of the Exec at our annual awaydays - just once a year we get together for an intense period of facilitated training and planning. It's  expected that something will happen while we're away - we've had an assortment of disasters including the famous Sheffield floods, so the incident plan is normally dusted off, but this time nothing untoward happened (or if it did, no-one told us!).

We had a very useful and busy time looking at a number of things. A useful exercise was looking at the external environment, and all of the different factors that could affect the HE sector, the University, and us. These then fed into an exercise of scenario planning, where we looked at possible different scenarios of what the world might be like in 5 years time, and how we might have to change to adapt to it. Something we'll be carrying on with the other managers in the department. As always, a big action plan resulting from the couple of days, and our facilitator will be checking up on us at regular intervals to make sure we've done everything we said we would.

This morning we had the third of our coffee and cake sessions, where we invite a random selection of staff to meet us for an hour to discuss anything they like.  Unfortunately our normal baker, Dave, is on holiday so I volunteered. Baking is not normally my strong subject, but the apple spiced muffins and banana & walnut loaf seemed to turn out OK. Mind you, I did have a couple of helpers during the baking process.

A lively discussion this morning, and topics included various capital projects around the University - the main question being why isn't the Information Commons Phase 3 being funded at the moment? We also talked about the financial situation facing the sector and the University, and the possibility of changes to the way we work with IT staff in faculties and departments. A lot of enthusiasm for more closer working.

Now I'm off to catch the train for my annual trip to the Chelsea Flower Show. The horticultural highlight of my year. Several pictures will be tweeted during the course of tomorrow if you're interested!

Business continuity, planning, and what's your mobile operating system?

The week started with a Business Continuity Operations Group which I chair.  Today we looked at reviewing the University's Incident Management Plan, which has been in existence for a while, and is time to be rewritten, especially as we've now tested it in a number of incident situations. We looked at how we handled some recent incidents - including the student occupation and the snow. Templates for departments to carry out Business Impact Assessments have also been drafted and we'll be trying them out with faculties and departments soon. We want to get Business Continuity integrated with the University's risk management process, and these should help. I keep saying "we",  but a lot of our progress is due to the hard work of the University Business Continuity Manager who is based in our department.

Then we had another planning meeting, this time with the Faculty of Social Sciences. A number of professional services were represented at it, and it was interesting hearing the discussion around a number of topics - estate strategy, marketing, recruitment and  student number planning. We contributed to many of the topics, including the need to create flexible and technologically rich teaching spaces and the importance of the web in marketing.

This afternoon we had an executive meeting where we looked at a near final draft of our Annual Report - which is looking very good! We also worked our way through a survey we're going to send to our students soon about mobile devices - what they own, what they use them for etc. Edinburgh did one last year and we've been relying on those results, but thought it was time we did our own. We're looking at what sort of devices people own, and how to get students to tell us what they have - had an interesting debate about how to describe a netbook, and whether they would know what operating system their smart phone has.

Equality, Diversity and Executive Improvement

Equality and Diversity Board yesterday - a very interesting committee consisting of a cross section of University staff and students as well as lay members, which seeks to ensure that the University is not only meeting its legal obligations with respect to equality and diversity, but is actively promoting it and embedding it in everything we do.  We receive reports from different areas of the University, and discuss with the relevant heads how equality and diversity is promoted in their departments, look at examples of good practice and make suggestions for further action. I'm impressed with the amount of activity in this area - lots of good things going on, and I learn something new at nearly every meeting.  Yesterday was the turn of the Careers Service who produced an excellent report and are very active in all areas.  Many of their resources are available here, and we had a lively discussion about many employability issues.

We also had a presentation on the Equality Act 2010, which aims to harmonise, simplify, clarify and strengthen existing discrimination law. There are a number of changes coming into effect which will affect some of our policies and procedures, including the health questionnaire for job applicants which will now be completed post job offer. 

Then today it was the Human Resources Management Committee  - another enjoyable and useful session, although I did get another presentation on the Equality Act, but that's my fault for being on both committees!

The rest of yesterday and today was taken up with two half day sessions with the Executive Team looking at our priorities for improvement within the team and how we interact with the department. We looked at:

• Planning
• Prioritisation
• Communication - both within and outside the department
• Decision Making
• Managerial Coherence
• Improving Processes
• Managing Complexity
• Financial Planning

A very long action plan came out of it, which we are going to spend the next couple of months working on ready for a review of far we have got in January.

Ch-ch-changes

Lots of meetings again today - this morning a meeting to look at change management. We're on the way to implementing ITIL - in a way that suits us - and are mainly looking at problem, incident, change and test management. Some good processes already in place, and we've looked at the sorts and amounts of changes we make by logging them all for a month. Today we were looking at what change management processes to put in place for planned changes and emergency fixes. What changes will be pre-approved, and what will need to go through a CAB (Change Advisory Board). What systems will need more scrutiny than others, and what data changes (rather than configuration changes) won't need approval at all. We also looked at how we will handle emergency fixes out of hours. Lots of heated discussion, and probably more questions than answers, but I'm sure our change manager will make sense of it!

This afternoon I got together with the rest of the Executive Team where we covered a whole range of things - from what titles we're using for staff, to feedback we're received recently about our services, and appointing a new PA to work with us. We also had a good discussion on some of the financial pressures facing all Universities at the moment, and how we might react to them.

Finally we met with a staff development colleague to discuss holding another "World Cafe" event for all staff in the department. This is part of our on going staff development programme, and the feedback on the last one we had was very good. The aim will be to bring all staff together so that they can have a say in how we go forward as a department, particularly in the light of challenges we are all facing in the sector. Hopefully it will produce some good outputs, as well as being an opportunity to network with colleagues, and be fun as well!

Savings and services

Back to work today with a vengeance. Long hot days in Mallorca, dips in the pool, and very good meals seem a long way away. Emails were looked at and mainly deleted last night, so today was a round of catch ups, meetings, and some difficult decisions to be looked at.

Like many Universities, we're looking for financial savings, and a number of staff are leaving - this department is losing 20 with many of them going in the next couple of weeks. Of course, the departures aren't evenly spread, with some teams being hit much harder than others. So, those discussions we started a few weeks ago of what we can stop doing, and where our priorities should be, are now going to be put into practice. There will be some hard choices, but we have to be clear that we cannot continue to offer the same services as we do now and certainly not manage them as we currently do. Unless a service affects the bottom line (ie bringing in more students, more research income or reducing costs) should we be doing it? Not in the current financial climate. So, an interesting few weeks in store.

As well as looking carefully at our services, we must not stop innovating - none of us want to work in a boring environment. So I am excited (yes really excited - how sad is that!), that I have two more brand new Gartner Hype Cycles to read. One on emerging technologies, and one on social software. Maggie Shiels on the BBC technology blog has already commented on the emerging technologies one, especially the suggestion that microblogging sites such as Twitter have peaked and are on their way to the trough of disillusionment. Haven't had chance to look at either in detail yet, so will reserve comments till later, although one thing that did strike me on a very quick glance at them both earlier this evening was the difference in timescales until technologies are adopted (and also with the Higher Education one I wrote about earlier).

Normally time to plateau is expressed as less than 2 years, 2-5 years, 5-10 years or more than 10 years, and there's usually a sprinkling of all of them. In the social software analysis, everything is so much quicker, with nothing taking longer than 10 years, and most things below 5 years. Much more rapid development and adoption.

I am of the opinion that we need to mirror this - rapid development and deployment is going to be key to staying ahead of the game.

As I said, the holiday seems a long time ago.....

Stop, Start, Continue

Lively session last week at a meeting of our Section Heads with the Executive Team. We brainstormed in three groups around what we should stop doing, what we should start doing, and what we should continue doing. Each group had a go at all three flipcharts, then we each picked our top priority in all three categories. The process was as good as the outcome, and we managed to find plenty to talk about and discuss. We didn't all agree with each other and that lead to some lively debate.

The "STOP" suggestions ranged from attending pointless meetings, moaning, and thinking narrowly, to fluffware (my favourite!), dithering and obsolete systems. The top priorities were (in no particular order):

• Making commitments without resource
• Waste of time meetings
• Support for too many systems and services
• Ridiculously complicated processes
• Making errors and ignoring, ie not learning from, them
• Moaning

START had a whole range of suggestions including many about how we work particularly promoting cross team working, reviewing and/outsourcing more systems including the portal and the VLE and a lot of suggestions around knowing our costs.

And top of the list were:
• Prioritising more effectively
• Cost /benefit analysis of current activities
• Promoting what we do
• Producing software with user-friendly interfaces
• Thinking of user requirements from the start
• Reducing the number of incidents through clear processes and communication

The things we wanted to continue were around valuing and developing our staff, innovating, providing core services and having a friendly and helpful attitude. Those with the highest scores were:

• Innovate
• Focus on quick wins (80/20 rule)
• Value staff
• Supporting Faculties
• To have a sense of humour
• Using common sense

So, that's just a flavour - we filled about 12 flip charts. Some very specific things listed and some very general. Now we're going to have hard decisions to make over the next few weeks about what we stop, start and continue and this discussion was very helpful and a good start.

Exec cause floods in Sheffield again!

Well, what an interesting day yesterday was. Interesting in the Chinese sense of the word of course.

It began well - the exec finished our strategic break where we'd discussed many things. We'd looked at different personality types and spent some time analysing ourselves to see how we best interact and communicate. We'd looked at team dynamics and communications within teams, both our own and others in the department and spent some time coming up with some actions to improve how some teams work. The current financial climate had taken up a lot of time, and we looked at a number of scenarios as to how we could reduce our costs but continue not just to maintain core services but also maintain innovation. This will require some very different ways of working and we will need to keep an open mind as we explore different ways of doing things. Outsourcing our student email to Google for example could be the first of a number of such moves as "software as a service" becomes more accessible to us. Reviewing some of our very expensive software deals and replacing with cheaper open source products might also be an option, but this is unlikely to reduce staffing costs. Any serious financial reductions will certainly lead a reduction in the quality of our service in some areas - or much more likely, a removal of services completely - but this needs to be managed carefully in discussion with our main customers.

So after this quite intensive round of discussions we set off home. I'm the only twitter user in the Exec, and as we came down the A1 in fairly bad rain I began to notice tweets from colleagues and friends in Sheffield about torrential rain (or rain of biblical proportions as someone described it!), thunder, more rain,and then that terrible word - floods. Details began to be posted of road closures and heavy traffic - gridlocked in some areas. We stopped at a service station just outside Sheffield to stock up on the essentials - chocolate and water - and were able to plan our route into Sheffield accordingly, someone having kindly tweeted me the link to the council web sited with the road closures on. Still took an hour to get across Sheffield, but at least we were prepared, so thank you Twitter friends. It didn't escape anyone's notice that the last time Sheffield flooded, the exec were away!

Then, later at night I noticed our web pages had stopped loading and our portal seemed to be unavailable - a work colleague had just posted in twitter so I knew he was around, so I asked him to look. Other work colleagues (and some who used to work with us) picked up my tweet and began looking. In about 5 minutes I had gathered lots of information about various systems which were unavailable and was able to make a detailed report to the technical team. Turned out to be a faulty load balancer which was soon fixed.

Our out of hours incident procedure is being reviewed at the moment - perhaps we should include Twitter in it!

Thinking time

One of the hardest things to do in any job is to find space and time to think - it's a luxury we can very rarely afford. I'm a great believer in trying to make the time if possible and for the next two days myself and the rest of the Executive Team are on a short strategic break. some of it will be looking at how we work together as a team and some setting our strategic priorities for the next year.

Today we looked at those areas where we have a departmental wide responsibility - outlined here - and looked at what progress we had made, and what there was still to do. I was surprised by the amount of progress we'd made in a number of them - almost 6 flip charts worth! However, we identified a lot of areas where there was still a lot of work to do. The whole area of resource management and allocation (in terms of people's time) was one - how we do we measure what people are doing so that we can make informed decisions about how much resource we can allocate to new projects and how much is spent keeping stuff running. We also need to know how we can reallocate resource between projects and what ares we might want to decrease the resource in. This was linked to a discussion on monitoring and evaluating new technologies and whether we might change our support and development model, and how we're going to implement our technology strategy.

Finance was of course another hot topic - how we can get better management information (identifying what we want is the biggest challenge) and how we can reduce costs, especially important in the current financial climate. We also need to know how much our services cost - so that we can make better informed decisions. Planning for financial uncertainty will be the subject of many future discussions I fear.

Connectivity and keeping in touch is interesting - the hotel is charging £15 a day for wireless access so I'm using a new modem, which I've just discovered has content control switched on which is blocking access to all sorts of sites - non of them dodgy at all your honour!

Still - I'm maanging to keep up to date with the Apple WWDC via Twitter - hoping for news of the new iPhone soon!