Leadership, change and donuts

Today I went to one of our Sheffield Leader cohorts, to talk to them about change management and leadership. Instead of a formal presentation, it took the form of an hours conversation - a question and answer session. An excellent group, some interesting and challenging questions, and the time seemed to fly by.

First question was  - what do I do? Always an interesting one. Lead the department, keep the vision, act as an ambassador, network, be the PR person, negotiate and influence, work with colleagues on strategy, monitor the internal and external environment, promote the CiCS culture, go to lots of meetings.....

Another one was how did CiCS come into existence, which made me think back to late 1995 when the then Registrar asked me to pull all of the IT in admin departments (as they were then, now we're Professional Services) together. The Department of Corporate Information was formed, which was a very short lived department lasting only months, until it was agreed that it would merge with Academic Computing Services, and to get a name that embraced both, Corporate Information and Computing Services was born. We've had a number of changes since, gaining telephony, Corporate Services, (AV, Print and Design, Timetabling and Performance Space) and Learning Technologists. Combined with my experience of bring the North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery into the Medical Faculty in 1994, I've had to manage a lot of organisational change :-)

Most of the other questions were about leadership, managing change, what had I learned, what techniques did I use, what was my style, etc. Some of my answers below, but I should point out that I'm not saying these are right, or that I stick to them all the time, but I do my best:

• Recognise that not everyone thinks like you. Other people are not put on this earth just to annoy you. I love change and positively thrive on it. Some people don’t. Instead of seeing change as an opportunity, they will see it as a threat. You need to understand them, and find out what is their fear.
• Talk to people, but more importantly listen. Go to see people in their place of work, not your office. 
• Gain trust. Be as open and honest as you can be, but more importantly, be credible. Say when you don’t know what to do, or have to change your mind, and admit to mistakes.
• Take risks, use your instinct. This isn't right for everyone, but in general I think we're too risk averse.
• Listen to different points of view - let  colleagues question your assumptions until a decision is made - then you all have to stick to it. Be firm, If you’ve made a decision, stick to it, see it through, but explain why.
• Accept people won't like what you're doing all the time. I joke that I have a broomstick and pointy hat in my cupboard for when I turn into a wicked witch.  If you have their trust and respect it shouldn't necessarily stop them liking you.
• You can always tell a good leader because people are following them, but that's no good if you don't know where you’re going. You need a very clear vision, know what you’re aiming for
• Communicate. Obvious, but not always done, and not always done to good effect.
• Language is very important - you have to use a language everyone understands, and that language is different for different audiences.
• Consider that feedback is a gift - don't be defensive, thank people for it. 
• Learn from mistakes. Investigate what went wrong and learn but don’t blame. 
• Coach staff so that you don't solve their problems but get them to a stage where they can solve their own problems. People often come to my door saying, we have a problem, what shall I do?. I always say, what do you think we should do? Nine times out of ten they tell me, and they're right.
•  Never make permanent enemies. Get on with people, especially people who matter and can get things done for you. Porters have always been people I try and get to know. Give favours freely. You never know when you might need them. 
• Listen. Know what's going on, walk the floor - a good leader likes gossip 
• Share credit for success but shoulder the blame for your staff,
• Be aware of your own weaknesses so that you can compensate and form a team with people who are complimentary to you. I am not a detail person - detail turns me right off. I'm also not a doer or completer. So, I have to have people around me who can see detail, and get on and do things. See if you can guess who they are :-)
• Use the Tinkerbelle principle -  if you can get enough people to believe in something, it will happen. Never say if, say when. Used very successfully to get the Information Commons built!
• Finally, maintain a sense of humour at all times, and a sense of perspective. Always ask your self, what's the worst that could happen?

The very last question was about motivation - how do I motivate staff especially when things are going wrong? Obvious answer - coffee and donuts.

Whack-a-Mole of new ideas

Next session was from Abilene Christian University about lessons from their mobile learning initiative

ACU is in Texas and has 5000 students,
They were the first university to establish a comprehensive 1to 1 mobile learning initiative that provides every student with an iPhone or iPod touch.

One driver was innovation and providing something to attract students.
But, the primary driver was the student profile.
Students coming in now were born in 1995, (he made the point that some of us have t shirts older than that)
They've never lived in a world where disaggregation isn't possible; where you can't always pause and rewind live TV.
They inhabit a world where you are always connected. There are more text messages sent now in a day than there are people on the planet.
Consumption spreads faster today, eg it took 2 years for Facebook to get to 50m users. It took 39 years for radio.
Implementation to saturation is very fast. It is only 3 years ago that the iPad was invented.

The world has changed, but have our classrooms?
Are our students engaged?

At ACU they had been trying to address the above two issues. In 2007 the iPhone was released. The Internet could now be in your pocket, all the time.
They set out to explore how this could be used in HE to foster innovation, and decided to give one to very student.

Some myths around innovation that they leaned during this implementation:
Innovation doesn't happen in eureka moments.
Innovation doesn't have a methodology. Need lots of trial and error and risk taking.
Best idea always wins. It doesn't.
People love new ideas. Not all do. Need to give people permission to go slowly. So, when they decided to roll out iPhones to all students, ( and they told faculty staff after they'd announced it),  they told staff they didn't have to let students use them if they didn't want to.

Resistance to change is part of our culture.
Are we playing Whack-a-Mole with new ideas? As they come up, we smack them down.

Organisational cultures are like an iceberg.
Top of iceberg things you can see. Artifacts
Below the surface are exposed beliefs. What we think is important
Down below. Basic assumptions. Things so engrained we can't find words for them. Each bottom one trumps the one above.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Only way to change culture is to work together to solve a problem. We need to reframe our discussions into a problem that we can solve collectively.

As you think about innovation on campus, remember that it's not about the technology. It's about the students, and preparing them for  the world they are going to inherit, not the ones they live in now.

Relationships

Keynote today was from Keith Ferrazzi, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, described as a thought leader.

It was a talk about change and relationship building. A fantastic speaker and storyteller, very compelling. Very difficult to take notes, but as usual, I've jotted down some main key points.

Behaviours don't change easily until your practices change.
For example, If you want a collaborative organisation, change 50% of your staff meetings to collaborative problem solving.

Relationships are critical to all elements of transformational success.
Highest return investment is a relationship investment.
It is the core of your success as a leader.
Need to build an environment round you that invites people in to build a relationship with you.

Most important element of a great relationship is trust.
Structural trust, eg because of role that you're in. But, this can be a barrier.
Professional trust, you get it because you respect each other's capabilities.
Personal trust, this is the critical one. Can be proactively driven and built.

Personal relationships can be built purposely.
People with better social capital are more likely to be promoted early, get better jobs, get larger bonuses.
He tells the story of someone complaining that a colleague always gets promoted, better chances etc because "the boss likes him better". His answer? "No shit."
That is a personal trust proxy.
Employees with most extensive social networks are 7% more productive.

How many of our staff think that we care about their success?
Managers with better social capital have teams which reach goals more rapidly, make better project managers, have teams which generate more creative solutions.
The number one factor for high performing business teams is deep social bonds.

Have many of us have a to do list?
A project plan?
A financial plan

Where is our people plan??

We need to identify the five to ten most critical people that we need to build better relationships with to archive our objectives. Could be vendors, senior team, business partners, own staff.
Then put plan in place to build those relationships.

He told story about how when he works as a golf caddy he was told by his Dad to turn up half an hour early. He used that time to walk the course, look at what was going on, talk to other workers. The information he gained made him one of the best caddies, and often requested.
So, think how you can show up at the golf course half hour early. Get better information.
Think how do you get to know your key people personally.
Build peer to peer connections and peer support groups.
In our teams, ask whether we we would let each other fail, not stay in our silos.


Action plan

Always ask who, not what.
Set goals, and see who can help. Who are the most important people to help us reach goals.

Systematically manage your targets
Focus attention where it counts. Measure the relationship quality. Don't just focus on the people you're comfortable with.

Expand your currency. Do your homework on individuals and how to help. Are you the sort of person people want to be around?

Accelerate relationships in every interaction
Prepare, research people.

Define your lifelines. A group that won't let each other fail.

Build your personal brand. Use social media

Lead with generosity, intimacy, candour and accountability
Ask for coffee, lunch, a call.

Never be afraid to ask, the worst anyone can say is no.

Ask, who in your life do you not let help you?




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End of the week round up

The end of another week, with some spectacular rain last night - you can tell I'm going camping later today - the weather always changes!

This week I've had a couple of meetings of the Senate Budget Committee on which I represent the Professional Services. We've been talking to the PVCs of each Faculty about how they handle budget allocation to their departments. One of the aims of the SBC is to make budgets and financial matters more transparent and easier to understand to the rest of the University, and their web pages are being added to with more information to help with that.

Also this week I've been marking the student innovation submissions which I posted about earlier, and yesterday I had a Conference Organising Committee for the main UCISA Management Conference next March. So many things to do a long time in advance - the venues and the catering are already booked and at the moment we're working on the speakers. Trying to attract the highest calibre ones is important to attract a high number of delegates, and we've got some stunning speakers lined up already!

This morning was our regular weekly CAB (Change Advisory Board) where we look at all significant changes lined up for the next few weeks and ask the all important questions including my favourite - what if it all goes horribly wrong?

Photos and processes

As part of our drive to simplify and standardise processes to improve our services, we set up a Process Improvement Unit last year. Yesterday we had a Steering Group meeting, chaired by the VC, where we looked progress so far. Lots of things being worked on, including a number of student related things - change of status forms, fee waivers, UKBA issues and helpdesk referrals in the IC.  There's some quick wins we think we can get by improving the speed and efficiency of processes, which in turn will improve services and free up resources. There's also some big projects we need to work on, and one of the things to come out of many different discussions is the critical nature of course data in our student system. It is used by so many different processes, and has to be right. It's curated and input by a number of different areas, and it isn't always as accurate as it might be. So, historically we have found ways round it, but we can't continue to do so - this is something major that we have to put right. Lots of other exciting things to be worked on, including helping departments across the University to think about and improve their processes. We're hoping for a step change in culture!

Also yesterday we visited our colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health for a Strategic Liaison meeting, where one of the main topics of discussion was eLearning. On-line assessment, distance learning, ePortfolios, learning technology - all important topics for them, and we talked about how we could help. We also touched on MOOCs, but more of that in a couple of weeks.

And if you're wondering about the pictures in this post....

When we moved into our new building we were faced with a lot of blank corridor space, so we asked our staff  to submit photos which could be blown up. printed and displayed, and the first set has just gone up. The quality was excellent - please don't take the quality of these photos as indicative - I've just walked down the corridor with my iPhone :-)  Unfortunately some didn't have a high enough resolution to be blown up to the required size, but we'll be doing it again soon. And to avoid accusations of favouritism, these are just the ones nearest to my office! It's really brightened the place up, well done folks.

Transformation Through Technology

This afternoon I've been to a briefing from the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) on their Transformation Through Technology (T3) initiative.

Started with an introduction from the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve. He emphasised that there is no option but to save money by becoming more efficient. In order to make savings, we need to share resources and share common goals. They hope we can learn from their experiences.
Criminal Justice system has always relied heavily on paper, but that is changing rapidly. Lot of money spent on IT systems in last decade, but didn't always get proper return on investment, not enough joined up thinking between departments, and didn't get most out of the systems which were implemented. Now wanting to get good ROI, and achieve modern, paperless processes. Not easy. Hard to change working practices. Savings will ultimately be achieved by stopping moving paper and people. So as well as better digital processes, will make more use of video links, for example between prisons and courts. Most police forces now transferring information to CPS electronically. This is then transferred to magistrates court electronically. Lots of tablets have been bought so that cases can be heard totally electronically. CPS solicitors use them in court and can annotate and navigate through large case files. Most are finding it quicker and easier than using large paper case bundles. They also have a secure email in place. The efficiency programme has not involved major capital investment, but has used systems already in place.

Then we heard from Chief Exec of CPS, Peter Lewis. Up till a couple of years ago, CPS alone were using 1m pages of photocopying a day! To move that amount of paper is never going to be fast and responsive. Very traditional system. Hadn't embraced technology and change in the way some of the other parts of the public sector had. Had to make 30% savings. Have lost 2000 staff in last two years. Hadn't got enough people to work with that amount of paper, nor the buildings to organise and store it. Had to work differently. No choice.
Also were looking to make the system better and more responsive.

Looked at the IT system and basic infrastructure they had in place. Courts and police services were not fit for purpose. CPS had clunky, 10 yr old system. Also a cultural issue. People used to working on paper, had to fundamentally change how they worked. Biggest problem was the history of IT in CJS had been a series of disasters. Many millions of £s had been spent in a decade. People did not believe that you could be serious about changing the system through IT. Not enough that the CPS changed because it was such an integrated system with the courts and the police.

Decided to take new approach. Had to prove what could be done, change mindsets about what was achievable. Create confidence in IT. Also needed a basic level of connectivity in the system to start making immediate savings. And, needed to learn about what a digital future would be like, what was digital working going to be like.

Looked at what they could do by connecting the creaky systems together. Do as much as they could, and persuade colleagues in other areas to go with them. Had some brave people in courts and police who committed to work with them. Made bold steps to allow them to go forward. Create a sense of momentum, change is happening. Don't wait for perfection, do something now. Also create sense of inevitability. Next stage is mandation. Needs clear leadership.

Have made real progress in magistrates courts, a lot is now paperless. Now moving to crown court. But major achievement is having a shared vision. So, for example, CPS and court systems will be bought together, a common IT system for the CJS. There's a sense of ambition. Technology is part of the answer, not a cross they have to bear.

Then Jeff Thomas, Business Change and Delivery Manager for CPS. A personal story of what digital working means in the CPS. Started experimenting in 2009, before T3. Everything from police that can be electronic had to be. Master file is the digital one, not the paper one. That was a major change and was key. Connectivity in court is vital, for receiving emails and evidence. Something we take for granted, but no wireless in courts, so had to rely on 3G dongles.

When T3 came along, he reported to it. One of the key things he said was
as long as the paper file remains the master file, you are constrained by the framework of processes which support it. To move from enormous bundles of paper to a digital case file requires both a cultural change, and a different way of working. Mindsets have to be changed.

Going paperless hasn't saved the money from savings on paper and toner, it's the savings on people needed to handle and move it and space to store it.
Nationally 22.2m sheets of paper are produced by the CPS on guilty pleas, would stack as high as a mountain.

They use the HP tablet, the standard laptop which flips to become a touchscreen tablet. Demonstrated the electronic system and how easy it was to flick though the bundle, search and annotate it. Can highlight, scribble and put virtual post it notes on the bundle. Can also have lots of other stuff on your tablet for reference.

A few key points:
Digital working allows more flexible working.
Eliminate redundancy. Make systems and kit sweat for you
Standardise processes. But build in room for innovation.
Can't run two systems, paper and digital, side by side.
Don't digitise inefficient processes


Where to next, wish list:
Connectivity in the courtroom
Defence buy in
A truly electronic file
A shared platform across the CJS

Then the Ministry of Justice CIO spoke about things they were doing, many of them things we take for granted. Good, single network. Upgraded PCs. Managed print service. Joined up systems. Standardisation.

In the Q and A at the end, security was mentioned. Interesting. Going down to fewer security levels. The main challenge is classification of data and having a risk based approach to security which is standardised so no multiple copies are held. Started being nervous about it, but they were losing paper! Think they are more secure now than before. Be adult about it. Digital media is more recoverable if a lunatic burns the court down! Most of what they do is public. They share a lot of their information with criminals. :-) Need a balance. Treat really sensitive information securely, but don't apply same rules to everything.

Are looking at authenticity as an issue, but you can alter paper. Will need discovery tools because of amount of data being collected. The analogue age suggests you read everything. Can't be done now.

Looking at more modern tablets eg iPad and working out how to make them secure. But the HP ones were good enough at the time to get something working.

In summary, this was a very good case study which I found very interesting, hence the amount of notes I took! The room was packed with people from many different sectors, so the transformational story is obviously one that is in many people's minds.

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Next session is from Kansas University and is about a change programme they've just run. They have a ten year strategic plan, and they're two years in. Lots of change, including in the curriculum, in research and has an efficiency agenda. 70 different initiatives, many involve IT.

Used experts in change management from across the University, many in academic departments. Developed an organisational change workshop for all staff, everyone from Deans to cleaners went on it, delivered 40 times. So, everyone on campus understood why the changes were being made, and how it was being done. Very important to understand the campus culture and climate.
Workshops looked at the different stages of change, and categorised people into 3 categories:
Denial. Not going to happen to me. Left out of workshop.
Judgement. Why are we doing this, not a good idea. 44%
Acceptance. Ok, it's going to affect me, better see how. Not necessarily agreement. 36%
Transformation. Hey, this is exciting, it's going to be great. 20%.
Most in this latter stage had been involved in planning the changes and were usually in leadership roles. So, lot of work to do in bringing everyone forward.

Task, Relationship, Identity are all important components of change. Lot of effort normally put into task, ie what is the change, implementing it. But, relationships and identity are just as important.

Resistance from three main places:
Thought based resistance, do people understand the change
Fear based, understand it but fearful of impact
Capacity based resistance. People worried that they might not have skills to to cope with new regime.
Good leaders understand these, and recognise that resistance can be positive.

Framework for communicating:
Initiative, explaining change
Understanding, make sure everyone understands it
Performance, where does everyone fit
Closure, celebrating success.

KU trained 15 volunteers from across academic and professional staff to act as facilitators to groups discussing the changes and implementing them. They helped the change leaders plan meetings, anticipate problems, have a clear focus, and held debriefings. Lot of good feedback from all areas.

Change doesn't happen by itself. Change needs to be facilitated. Change can be managed by acquiring skills and using a common language across campus. Change must fit the culture.



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Location:Managing change

Square One

Next session, Square One: a prescription for operational excellence. Just took a few notes, but the presentation is here.

Institution's success and reputation is built on operational excellence, and our credibility within the University is built on it. Your never going to have a strategic conversation with your VC, if your talking about why a system isn't working.

Most outages caused by either systems and hardware failures, or people and process issues. 80% caused by people and processes. 50% of these are specific to change processes. Concentrating on hardware/systems only gives you the opportunity to improve 20% . Need to get your processes right, and invest in people.

Most of our budget is on staff. We need to invest in them, training etc.

Need to deal with negative reaction avoidance, fear of doing something and getting a negative reaction.

Fear of failure is high. People respond to positive rather than negative. Need a space where it's safe to say I can't do this, or I don't know how to.

Leadership sets the tone. The team needs to be in control with management as coach. Teams and individuals can increase their skills and ability to expand their capacity to think and solve problems as they arise. Catch people doing something right, spotlight it and reward it. "Right" can be as simple as someone documenting a process.

Managing change has the biggest impact on improving the reliability of a service. A change request process, Change Advisory Board and Change Window are the foundation of operational excellence. The default position for a CAB is that changes are not approved.

We have regular progress meetings etc during projects, but what about services that are in production? An operational planning meeting focused on only the health of a service needs to happen regularly for critical services even when there is no change planned.

Use RASCI charts when decisions made. Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed.

Then we went through a plan for looking at a service and delivering operational excellence. The plan is here.
We chose email on our table. Interesting discussion about different way of achieving operational excellence and different risks with in house vs outsourced services.


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Business Process Management Practices in Education

Gartner's definition of BPM is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and agility.

Businesses tend to look at markets, products and functions, and often miss processes. But, that is the main work that we do. Processes create value. Often taken for granted. Often not seen end to end. Often hidden in applications, tasks or overlapping practices. Increasingly unstructured and unautomated. Often no ownership end to end.

Many barriers, functional barriers, and hierarchical barriers, lead to management blind spots.

We're not very mature as a sector in dealing with BPM.

Some benefits from BPM include increased agility, faster delivery time ( good BPM projects are less than 4 months) and increased customer satisfaction. BPM is also a source of competitive advantage. In IT, BPM can reduce the "running the business" costs.

How to get started in BPM. Consider the 3 Cs.
Competence, (eg have to be good at change management)
Confidence
Credibility

Most BPM projects driven out of IT departments because we already look across different departmental silos, and we're used to thinking about processes.

Start with small proof of concept. Then do another, and another. Each time, you're building a business case for your next BPM project. Keep staff numbers small. Projects should be low impact and low risk to start with, and not in IT in order to get credibility. Has to be something the business cares about, eg staff recruitment or induction. Stopping doing stuff is a valid part of the process.

Then, step up to high impact, high visibility projects. Eg Customer facing, large scope.

BPM is about change management, a core element of which is communication. So, you need to communicate what you're doing. Has to be relevant, compelling and repeatable. Make it business focused. Communicate your success. If you can't do it, the BPM programme will die. Has to be at least quarterly. Tailor the comms to different audiences. Make sure you get the "what's in it for me" messages. These will be different for different staff. Eg for execs, will it improve business performance?
For line manager, will it help me achieve management goals?
For workers, will it make my job better?

Develop your key objectives. Eg, improve customer satisfaction to 90% by September 2013. Must be hard, tactical and impactful. Need metrics, and the most important of these is a baseline.

Some common failures:
BPM project costs are more than the benefits
Endless analysis and no results, mapping current processes instead of improving anything
Rushing to a solution, deploying a technical solution that increased transaction time.

Successful implementations require:
Business driven projects
Visible projects, killer processes
Projects with strong cost savings element.
Ongoing engagement of subject matter experts
Gain trust of employees
Strong partnership with IT
Frequent reviews of quality
Iterative and rapid process development process
Utilising trial and error approach. Don't be afraid to make mistakes.

Excellent session, and lots for our new LEAN unit to think about.


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Miscellaneous meetings....

Yesterday I spent some time catching up with colleagues from other departments - I'm a great believer in networking which to me is essential for team work. Lots of things to talk about, including bringing some colleagues from the Recruitment Equality Objectives Focus group up to speed with the focus group and workshop from last week. The middle of the day was spent seeing a physiotherapist for my injured knee, which was very helpful and very painful in almost equal measures.

Later in the afternoon we had an incident review as one of the changes we'd approved at last week's Change Advisory Board hadn't gone entirely to plan! We use these as learning exercises in the expectation that we can reduce the risk of similar things happening again.

Today began with a meeting between all Heads of Department and the University Executive Board where the main topic for our round table discussion was the recent letter sent by Michael Gove to Ofqual suggesting changes to A levels. In it he asserted that the main purpose of A levels was progression to higher education and that existing A levels were not adequately preparing students for University. He wants closer involvement from HEIs, especially Russell Group Universities to restore credibility to A levels. His suggestion is that new A levels with revised content, assessment and grading are introduced in 2014.

Some lively discussions took place, and there was some agreement on our table that in some areas  there's an emphasis on assessment and learning how to pas exams, rather than learning critical and problem solving skills. As someone put it, "Students are being taught to give perfect answers to simple questions. We'd prefer they gave imperfect answers to complex ones.

From then on I was in back to back meetings, including a discussion on a new policy on Research Data Management which three Professional Service departments (us, the Library and Research and Innovation Services) have cooperated on and will be going forward to Research and Innovation Committee next week.

World after Midnight

Great end to the conference with a really good session by Eddie Obeng.
What a performer! He had so much energy, and made it a really interactive session. Most of it was about change, and if you want to know why he thinks we need to change, spare 9 minutes to watch this:





His talk was videoed, and rather than try and summarise it, I'll post a link to it later.


Excellent conference, and now I'm off to Devon for a weeks holiday. See you when I get back!

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Releasing CRABs

This week we had a Service Strategy Board, where looked at a release management policy. "Releases" can come form several different sources - projects, internal pieces of work which aren't projects, and supplier driven releases, such as upgrades or new feature implementations.  Currently we don't have a formal release policy which is consistent across all three different types, although we do have a good "go live" checklist as part of our project management process. So, we've now agreed to have a formal release policy for all three types, which we are combining with change management - our Change Advisory Board (CAB) in effect becoming a Change and Release Advisory Board (CRAB).  To keep it manageable it will be as lightweight as possible, and only apply to significant releases.  One of the issues we looked at was how this links with process change, as many projects involve changes to organisational processes, which may or may not be coincidental with the release. Often these processes are not owned by CiCS, so this is an area for further discussion.

Talking of processes, we're moving ahead with our implementation of LEAN,  and have the go ahead to set up a small unit which will be based in CiCS. A Steering Group will help us prioritise and monitor progress, and we're gong to move on this as soon as possible.  Exciting stuff!

I've also had a meeting this week with the CEO of Yorkshire Universities about the possibly of talking to their Executive Management Group about Shared Services next month, which I have agreed to do. The plan will be to get them talking about the possibility of sharing services, and what opportunities there are.  Just looked at the membership of the group and spotted University of Lincoln in there. Didn't know Yorkshire had taken over Lincolnshire.....

LEAN BBQs

Exciting day yesterday as we began our journey to becoming LEAN. And no, I don't mean a mass diet. We're using some excellent help from the St Andrew's LEAN unit to help us understand the way it works, and we're running through two different processes - Maintenance of programme regulations and student computer account registration. Hopefully after that we'll be able to demonstrate the benefit to the University and get some commitment to take it further forward.

This morning we had an interesting telephone call with a Gartner analyst about introducing release management into our cycle and that led to a discussion about how some of our processes including change management and project management fit together. Lots to think about.

I'm also involved in planning a session for our Internal Communications Network on using social media  - looking at the pros and cons of using blogs, Twitter etc in a work setting. I have plenty of examples of both, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

And today is our departmental BBQ - the last one in the picturesque setting of our car park. Hopefully by this time next year we'll be in our new building with a proper garden with grass and everything. Off to chop salads now, but expect photos here later.

CABs, Admissions and White Paper

A few things to catch up on. Last Wednesday I was in London at a meeting of the UCAS Admissions Process Review Group. Lots of extremely good research has been carried out using prospective students, students who've been through the system, schools, colleges, universities and both good and bad points about the system identified. Lots of very exciting proposals for change, and we're in the middle of considering them now, and of course wider stakeholder groups are also being consulted. Expect to see a report for consultation around September.

Also this week I've been involved in discussions about how we might offer Google accounts to students when they leave and become alumni, and bout how our data migration in preparation for our move to Google calendar for staff is going.

This morning was our weekly  Change Advisory Board, and a discussion about when is the best time to do some upgrades to our core routers, which might, if it all goes horribly wrong,  cause a network outage, and some server outages. Of course the answer to that is never, so we have to look for the least worst time. It is definitely an issue with the current 24/7 expectation, that finding maintenance windows gets harder.

Oh, and of course, the other interesting event this week was the White Paper. Watched the debate on a live BBC stream, and followed the breaking news through the day on twitter.  Supposed to be released at 3.30 but late in the day a delay was announced, leading to much speculation on twitter for the reasons. My two favorites were:

"#HEWhitePaper delay: BIS officials struggle with numbered paragraph issues in Word 2007"

and

"I presume the #HEWhitePaper delay is down to the possible plagiarism found in it by Turnitin"

Implications for IT to follow when I've managed to read though and digest it all.

Need to get the T shirt...

After a great day at Chelsea (hundreds of pictures here if you've got time to kill), I was back down to London the following day for a meeting of the UCAS Admissions Process Review group. This was the second meeting, and is a steering group overseeing a fundamental review of how the admissions process works. Representatives from schools, colleges, Universities, the NUS and other interested bodies are involved, and this meeting was looking at the huge amount of research that has gone on already into how the current process works, how things happen in other countries, and what changes schools, prospective students and Universities would like to see made.  The next task is to analyse all of the findings in more detail and come up with a set of recommendations - which will be the most interesting part, and expected to happen over the summer.

Yesterday we had a bit of a brainstorm over the expected Higher Education White Paper and what it might contain, and how we might react to it.  More unknowns than knowns at the moment, although we can make some educated guesses. It's already very delayed over the original published date of March 2011, and the latest guess is that we're expecting it in the middle of June.

We had a Change Advisory Board this morning, and one of the interesting changes we talked about was the technical things we have to do to take part in IPv6 day. As a university we will be taking part, and ensuring that our main web site is running on IPv6 on June 8 2011 - like many other organisations including Google, Facebook and yahoo.  We're hopeful that everything will be fine, although some users may experience some slowing down of web access, depending on how their clients are set up. I jokingly suggested that we should wear T shirts advertising the occasion, and only later discovered that they do actually exist.

Later this morning we had one of our Strategic Liaison meetings with the Faculty of Arts. Lots of good discussion around learning and teaching and research support.

To blog and tweet, or not to blog and tweet......

Quietish blogging time at the moment - lots of time being spent doing stuff I can't write about, including some HR work and marking funding submissions.

I have had time though to take part in a few other interesting meetings this week. We've produced an updated Data Quality Policy for our corporate data which will hopefully be approved fairly soon.  In terms of quality we're looking at relevance, correctness, completeness and timeliness of the data in our systems, and we've put together a series of  aims and objectives, as well as examples of good practice supporting the quality of data. It will be published and available soon.

Changes to our change management system are about to be introduced, which will see a more active approach to approving changes instead of the more passive  "if we don't object you can do it" system we have at the moment. The CAB (change advisory board) will move from virtual to physical, at least for a trial period.

I've also had some discussions with other senior members of the department about communication, especially feeding back both during and after conferences, seminars, and other events.  I'm obviously a great believer in doing that using social media - the whole reason I set this blog up was to answer the question from my department, "what do you do?"  I felt it was particularly important to feedback on conference sessions, link to to relevant information and presentations,  say what I thought was interesting or relevant etc. With the advert of twitter and hashtags, you can now feedback during the conference itself, allowing people to keep up with events who aren't there, share important information, links etc.  I've followed a number of conferences recently from the hashtag. Some have many people tweeting, some much fewer. The most recent was the AHUA (Association of Heads of University Administration aka Registrars) Conference, thanks to the lone tweeting Registrar from Nottingham University, Paul Greatrix. Fascinating to see the things they were discussing, although I understood he got the mickey taken out of him by the rest, but as he said, leadership is hard!

So, there's been some discussion here about why the other members of the Exec, and indeed the rest of the section heads, don't do it, and whether they should. I have my own  view, obviously, and there have been others expressed, but if you have a view, then put it in the comments. Would be interested to know.

Changes

Opening session at EDUCAUSE is a general session open to all delegates. You really get a feel for how big the conference is in these plenaries. And at this one we had the pleasure of "recognising" our own Peter Tinson as a member of the programme committee.

The session was delivered by Gary Hamel and was called Reinventing management in a networked world. It was about change, and how to get organisations to change. How to outrun change. How to build an organisation which is as nimble as change itself. Most change encounters organisational inertia. 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy) applies to organisations as well which tend to lose energy after a while.

Most important question we should ask is are we changing as fast as the world around us.

Cultural change is fast.Technology faster.
Knowledge even faster. 8% of what we know we learnt in last 5 years.
Exponential change is all around us. Some examples - World population, energy consumption, Internet addresses, gene sequencing.

The Web is a good example of disruptive change. This is what it does:

Dematerialises. Undermines the physical infrastructure. Eg IBooks, downloads of films replacing blockbuster. Zopa. Bank with no bankers. Will on line learning replace traditional? Need to cut the business loose from physical assets
Disintegrates. It splinters organisations, markets and products. So easy to combine, recombine, mashup. Not tied to distribution economics. Bundled model of TV will get pulled apart by things like apple TV. Will specialist providers of education emerge?
Disintermediates. It dislocated activities or renders them obsolete. Eg on line insurance, estate agents.
Democratises. It gives everyone the chance to create value. Makes it easy to discover like minds and collaborate .eg linux development, crowd sourcing.

Anything that can be delivered digitally, will be. If you don't do it, someone else will. If you don't harness the power of open innovation and peer production, someone else will.

Longevity is no guarantee of future survival. Look at newspapers. Universities hardly changed in a millennium.

In many areas there have been enormous changes, and expectations have changed. For example:
How you read a book
How you buy music
How you buy software

Will how we get an education be next?

If this revolution is going to happen, who's going to lead it? Revolution is often led by insurgents not incumbents. Gues which is which:

Microsoft/Google
Kodak/Canon
Nokia/Apple
AT&T/Skype
Barnes and Noble/Kindle

In a world of discontinuous change, people who live by the sword will be shot by those who don't.

Too often in organisations change is at the margins. Infrequent and convulsive. Takes a crisis to change.

Some challenges that have to be overcome:

Cognitive challenge. Get beyond denial. Don't live in the past. Organisations don't miss the future because it's unpredictable, but because its unpalatable. AT&T couldn't believe that data traffic would ever overtake voice traffic. Cycle of denial same in boardrooms as in bedrooms. Look at music industry and mp3.
Treat every belief as a hypothesis. Every business is successful until it's not. And the not can happen quickly.
Seek out the dissidents and critics and listen to them.
Spend time out on the bleeding edge. Look outside at where change is already happening. Look at other industries. Talk to young people.
Try to imagine the unimaginable

Strategic challenge. Think of evolution. If life ran on principles of some organisations we'd still be slime. Need to evolve. Experiment. Google gets it. Constant experimentation. Lots of small ideas to test. Crowdsource your strategy. Dont keep it to a few individuals at the top.
You need 100 ideas to get 100 experiments to get 10 projects to get 1 winner.

Political challenge. Realign talent and capital. There's a bank in Bangladesh making small loans mainly to women with hardly any paperwork. Easier for a woman in Bangladesh to get resources to innovate than in most of our organisations. Give employees virtual money to invest in ideas.

Existential challenge. Enlarge our sense of mission. The one laptop per child project when started everyone said it can't be done. Need to start with an aspiration. Apple have reinvented 4 industries: Computer, mobile phone, music, retail. Apple stores are apparently the most profitable stores in the world. Comes from an underlying passion to make a difference.

We need to take a personal risk and start to change our organisations.

SSB, SAGs and change

First meeting of our Service Strategy Board today - part of our new governance structure. All of our service managers were there, and we had a good discussion about how we're going to operate, terms of reference etc. New Service Advisory Boards will be set up over the summer in each of our service areas consisting of our customers and stakeholders to advise us on strategy and service improvements. We also approved our change management procedures which will go live in 10 days time - will be quite a significant change for many of us, but hopefully will mean we can deliver a better and more reliable service in line with University objectives.

Oh, and we gave our network a good testing today as quite a number of staff watched the England football match on various streaming sites. Think it reached maximum capacity and had to be tweaked somewhat. Would love to know figures if anyone has them. Think the BBC had to throw a lot of capacity at their servers as well. Still, we won!

LHC and Digital Worlds

Yesterday was an exciting day if you're a scientist (or even if you're not), as the Large Hadron Collider successfully completed the first collisions of proton beams at speeds and energy far in excess of what's been achieved before. I don't pretend to understand it all , (I might have a science background but was never very good at Physics), but I appreciate the scale and the importance of what happened. It was exciting watching it happen, and another answer to people who still don't seem to get Web 2.0, especially Twitter. I followed the @cern feed and their rapid fire tweets had me on the edge of my chair:


The hashtag #cern had several hundred people commenting, and I ended up following some of the scientists who were actually there making it happen, as well as more famous commentators including Professor Brian Cox. Then there was the live web cast which I had open in the top corner of my screen so that I could continue working (on an audit report, so needed some light relief....). It was good to see so much input from British Scientists, and I hope that the investment in science is maintained through what could be difficult financial times. Investment in science will be key to our economic recovery.

I had another brush with science yesterday when we had a follow up meeting with our Professor of Digital Worlds, and how we might work together to take forward some of his projects. These include analysing the masses of data we hold on such things as purchasing, and student progression, and also looking at how we can take advantage of the Digital Region Project which is currently bringing high speed broadband to South Yorkshire. Will be good to have some involvement in research projects. We already do of course provide a lot of input into our High Performance Computing projects but this will be something different.

Other meetings over the past few days include more discussions on change management, and a look at progress on using our collaboration tool, uSpace to handle information on our institutional contacts overseas. Some good progress been made, and it's been a good use of an existing tool, and avoided us having to write or buy a new system.

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!