Admin Team meeting yesterday afternoon - and a presentation on the Research Excellence Framework.
Every five years or so the Funding Councils assess the quality of research in British universities, and use this rating to determine how much funding each institution will get for research. This Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was first carried out in 1986, and is being carried out now. Our return went off last October, and included 4 research outputs for each member of staff to be assessed (usually research papers in journals) as well as details of research income, and other indicators of quality. A tremendous amount of work goes into putting this together, and a series of panels then considers this mountain of data, and awards each department or discipline a rating.
However, this is the last time this will happen - the RAE is no more. It's being replaced by the Research Excellence Framework, which is currently out for consultation. It is being proposed that for STEM departments (Science, Engineering, Technology and Medicine) a series of metrics will be introduced. Some such as research income and number of postgrad research students will be obtained from our HESA returns. Others will rely on citations of research papers obtained from a citation index such as Web of Science.
For Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects, which will interestingly include Maths and Stats, some sort of peer review process will remain.
This new system will be phased in gradually, but could have an impact on us fairly soon, both in terms of HESA data returns, and the development of systems to collect data and manage the process.
Showing posts with label adminteam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adminteam. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Monday, 10 December 2007
Meeting monday, wind turbines and robots
A Monday full of meetings today. First a meeting of Heads of Departments with the Vice-Chancellor and Senior Management Team. Much of the discussion centred around progress with achieving some of the goals he outlined in his first HoDS meeting soon after he was appointed a couple of months ago. Progress is being made on transparency, changes to the organisational structure, ownership of financial planning, reducing bureaucracy and realigning the professional services to work within the new structure. We also discussed longer-term strategy, FEC (Full economic costing), and sustainability.
This was followed by Admin Team, and we began with a presentation about the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC). The AMRC is based in the Advanced Manufacturing Park (down the Parkway towards the M1). It was formed by Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Keith Ridgway, and is a hugely successful enterprise, with partners including Boeing, Rolls Royce and BAE Systems. Their Factory of The Future is due to open in a few weeks time, and will provide a sate of the art facility for technologies to be developed and implemented with a zero carbon footprint. The facility will have two wind turbines, and a ground source heat pump amongst other energy saving and conserving features. Colleagues in CiCS have been working with the AMRC to provide them with data and voice connections to the main University campus. I’m not an engineer, nor have I ever found engineering particularly interesting, but I was fascinated by the research and development being undertaken there. Because the equipment is state of the art, and the same size as used in industry, partners don’t have to scale up any processes. Research into machining can drastically reduce the time taken to produce components- one example reduced production time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds. They are also looking at robots – used extensively in manufacturing – but apparently they aren’t very accurate so AMRC are looking to make them more accurate. It was suggested they could practise on MFI flatpacked furniture for a real test of how good they are!
Estates Strategy Advisory Group then reviewed all existing and proposed capital projects – I’ll do another post about this and the potential implications when these are finalised.
This was followed by Admin Team, and we began with a presentation about the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC). The AMRC is based in the Advanced Manufacturing Park (down the Parkway towards the M1). It was formed by Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Keith Ridgway, and is a hugely successful enterprise, with partners including Boeing, Rolls Royce and BAE Systems. Their Factory of The Future is due to open in a few weeks time, and will provide a sate of the art facility for technologies to be developed and implemented with a zero carbon footprint. The facility will have two wind turbines, and a ground source heat pump amongst other energy saving and conserving features. Colleagues in CiCS have been working with the AMRC to provide them with data and voice connections to the main University campus. I’m not an engineer, nor have I ever found engineering particularly interesting, but I was fascinated by the research and development being undertaken there. Because the equipment is state of the art, and the same size as used in industry, partners don’t have to scale up any processes. Research into machining can drastically reduce the time taken to produce components- one example reduced production time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds. They are also looking at robots – used extensively in manufacturing – but apparently they aren’t very accurate so AMRC are looking to make them more accurate. It was suggested they could practise on MFI flatpacked furniture for a real test of how good they are!
Estates Strategy Advisory Group then reviewed all existing and proposed capital projects – I’ll do another post about this and the potential implications when these are finalised.
Monday, 19 November 2007
Executive Team
Several meetings today, and I wasn’t impressed that the last one was at 5pm! I’ll start with the one of most relevance to the department - the Executive Team meeting. Items discussed included:
Other meetings included the Admin Team – the Heads and Directors of the Professional Services - where the main item of discussion was the implications of the restructuring, and a meeting to discuss transparency and information flows.
- How CiCS might have to realign its services to take account of a major restructuring of the University which will happen next year. I’ll post more on that later when the report is circulated to the Senate.
- ITIL - this provides a structured framework for best practices for IT Service management and related processes. ITIL has been widely implemented within the IT industry but has only recently been adopted by the HE sector. A number of Universities have started implementing ITIL in specific areas with a view to applying the principles to other areas over time. The areas covered are:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
Potential benefits of implementing ITIL include improved service quality, better resource allocation and pro-active IT management.
We’ve agreed that in principle we want to implement ITIL but in order to find out more, and decide which bits and how, we’re arranging a half-day overview for key people.
We’ve agreed that in principle we want to implement ITIL but in order to find out more, and decide which bits and how, we’re arranging a half-day overview for key people.
- Lessons learnt from the power outage incident last week – we’ll be having a number of discussions about how we might improve a number of things.
- How we might provide training and support for staff in CiCS who manage staff, by setting up a management development programme, tailored to the needs of individual staff
Other meetings included the Admin Team – the Heads and Directors of the Professional Services - where the main item of discussion was the implications of the restructuring, and a meeting to discuss transparency and information flows.
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