Departmental meeting

Today we had a departmental meeting, always a good turn out, and today we had our Registrar Dr Phil Harvey, as a guest to speak to us. He gave a very good overview of our current situation in terms of student admissions and issues we might face over the coming years as some of the recent changes such as fees and the AAB numbers take effect. He outlined some of the investments we're making as part of the capital programme, particularly in Engineering, where we're investing heavily in order to grow our student numbers - about £150m on a number of developments including a new building to house specialist engineering labs, teaching space including lecture theatres and seminar rooms, and importantly for us, a large amount of student led learning space. Or Information Commons space, as we like to call it. We'll be able to build on our 5 years of experience of our existing IC, and design something even more exciting. Phil also commented on our recent social media success, which he described as me finding a league table that puts us in the same top ten as Harvard! I shall have to keep my eyes open for more.

A good Q and A session followed, and Phil then presented our ABBAs, Above and Beyond Awards, nominated by anyone in the department. Some well deserving nominees, and very difficult to chose between them, but we had a winner in each category. Gary Helliwell for exceptional work dealing with a network outage caused by a flood on Christmas Day, Tom Jenkins for his expert help and advice on all things Google, and the Drama Studio front of house staff for excellent service.

Next up was me talking about our planning statement we've just submitted. All Professional Service departments submit one each year to a standard template covering a review of the past year, key aims and objectives for the following year, and our view of the external environment in which we are operating and how we might need to react to it. What struck me was how many things we have on our "external environment" list. Here's a sample:
Consumerisation of IT
Rise in ownership of smart, mobile devices
Bring your own device and support issues
Increasing user expectations and increasingly discerning customers
Changes to working practices, more mobile, flexible, remote
Data storage demand increasingly hugely
Efficiency agenda
Sustainability
Increased demand for collaboration internal, national and international
Pace of change of technology
Critical nature of IT infrastructure and expectation of always on always connected
Compliance with increasing legislation, eg KIS, UKBA, HEAR
Different service delivery models, cloud, shared, outsourced

That's just a selection and quite a list. In order to respond, some key things we need to do are become more agile, more flexible, more facilitative rather than proscriptive. We need to support and promote innovation, especially rapid development, and consider all forms of service delivery. Mobile needs to be built into everything, and the student experience put at the forefront in all areas. We also need to play a leading role in the efficiency agenda, which we'll be doing mainly though our new LEAN Unit, but through other techniques as well.

I'll cover some of the other areas presented at the meeting in a separate post. This one looks as though it's getting a bit long!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Shares in post-it notes anyone?

A fairly major event took place all of last week for those staff involved in registering students - we had our first LEAN Rapid Improvement Event.  Facilitated by the excellent LEAN Unit at St Andrews, we were particularly looking at how students get registered for a computer account and issued with a UCard. Staff from many different areas of the University took part over the 5 days - from CiCS, Student Services, Student Union, Institute for Lifelong Learning, Medicine - and I'm sure there were more I've missed.  I wasnt there, but have reports back that it was an excellent event - hard work for everyone involved who had to completely and in detail map out current processes, uncovering many things along the way, including how many different "statuses" we have for our students:

Also how the process which was originally degined for undergraduate students arriving in September, didn't fit other students - part time, postgraduate etc. Then come up with actions to radically change and improve the process.

Lots of hard work involved, and I'd like to thank everyone who took part - especially under the pressure of the stop clock! Of course, the really hard part starts now, as we have to make the changes that the group came up with.

We've got a second event coming up in December, and hopefully we can then persuade the University to get LEAN established to radically improve and streamline processes across the University.

One of the other things I missed was our departmental meeting yesterday. Normally I am there, but due in part to the lack of public transport from a small North Yorkshire town on a Sunday which meant I couldn't get back from a weekend away until yesterday, I couldn't be there. So, instead I decided to use some of the technology we use in Teaching to give my report - we use Echo 360 for lecture capture across the University, and I have a version for personal capture installed on my mac on my desk. So, I used that. Apart from forgetting to look at the camera rather than the screen, I don't think it was too bad, and I'm going to use it now for recording other short messages which will probably go on here. For anyone who missed it, or wants to look at the technology, it's here.

Shine on...

About 3 times a year we have a departmental meeting - there's over 200 of us, so difficult to get everyone together but we do our best. Yesterday was a good one, and in fact many people have said to me that it was the best ever!  We try and keep people in touch with whats going on in the departmnt, so there's often a couple of demos of new services, and also we get an external speaker - we've had both the  VC, and the Registrar recently.

Yesterday we had a demo of our new on-line registration system which will allow most of what students need to do to register with us to be done before they arrive. Also we have a new Enquirer and Applicant portal which is being developed using our new portal technology, Liferay, which is looking good.

We also had a demo of Google Calendar which we'll all be moving to in the next few weeks. Very different to the one we use now (Oracle calendar), but I was impressed with the features we saw yesterday, and it integrates so much better with other apps including mail. Our move to Google mail went really well, but the issues around moving calendar data from one system to another are so much more complicated than moving mail, so we're doing lots of checking, and not hopefully managing user expectations....

We reported on our survey on student mobiles (will do a separate post on that), but the highlight of the meeting was a talk from one of our Prov-Vice-Chancellors - Professor Tony Ryan OBE who is a Professor of Chemistry. He appears on the BBC radio 4 programme Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince, and was recently on stage with them at Glastonbury. Tony talked to us about a major project in the Faculty of Science - Project Sunshine.  I couldn't possibly do credit to the talk - Tony is an excellent presenter, and is passionate about this research. Based on the fact that we're running out of fuel and food, Project Sunshine brings together many different research areas in the University to harness the power of the sun to solve these enormous problems.

As lots of people said to me afterwards, it made you proud to work at this University. Many of our staff don't some into contact with academic research very often, and this really showed people why we're here.  I decided to call this post Shine On, and that probably implies that Tony is a crazy diamond. Well, he's not really crazy, but certainly a diamond.

Days of Future Passed

One of sessions at our departmental meeting last week was a look back at what we've achieved over the past year, and a look forward to what we're aiming for this year.

Our overarching themes continue to be:

• Reducing our carbon footprint/Green IT
• Improving the Student Experience
• Reducing complexity
• Improving Resilience
• Doing more with less

So, a summary of achievements and priorities by service area:

Learning and teaching
2010
– MOLE 2 (our new VLE based on Blackboard Learn 9) Pilot
– Common Timetabling Pilot
– Learning and Teaching Space improvements
2011/12
– MOLE 2 – implementation
– Common Timetable Pilot (again)
– New managed student desktop based on Windows 7
– Piloting teaching with laptops to make better use of lab spaces
– Satisfaction survey of all students / Survey students about mobile devices

Research and Innovation
2010
– Support for Computer Simulation using graphical processing units
– Central License Management
– Working together with Research Groups
2011/12
– Upgrade Iceberg (our High Performance Computer)
– Research Funding - URMS ( the University’s Research Management System  that researchers use to cost funding bids) now automatically lets us know when about research submissions that have a heavy computing requirement.
– Better Research Data Storage and management - working with the Library to reduce the amount of data stored in inapprpriate ways, and to improve its life cycle management

Communication and Collaboration
2010
– Move to IP Telephony
– Improve Video Conferencing facilities including installation of another Access Grid
– Implemented Google mail and calendar for students
2011/12
– Develop an Enquirer and Applicant Portal
– Implement a new portal based on Liferay
–  Implement Google Apps for Staff Google
–  Implement a text messaging system
–  Complete new Content Management System roll-out

Help and Support
2010
– Implemented Self Service and Live Support on Helpdesk
– Worked closely to improve links with IT Support in Faculties
– Wokred with departments to deliver targeted training, especially improved induction for staff
2011/12
– Upgrade SupportWorks (Helpdesk software) to a system supporting service management
– Develop Professional Services Strategic Liaison
– Review of Information Security policies and procedures

Corporate Information
2010
– SAP Upgrade
– Upgrade of CIS (student Information System) and  CRM
– Implemented Student Attendance Monitoring
2011/12
– SAP upgrade continued - this is a long term project
– Statutory Items (HESA, UCAS, SLC, PBI, Payroll). Acronym City. Has to be done.
– Implement Online registration

Infrastructure
2010
– Resilience - server virtualisation, introduced new hardware for VMWare and moved major systems onto Solaris Zones. Improved network resilence by removing single points of failure, setting up dual paths round campus and using resilient load balancers
– Increased storage capacity
–  Green IT - 5 year energy costs reduced from £500,000 to £150,000 due to server virtualisation
2011/12
– On and Off site Bandwidth increase / management - hoping to increase link to 10Gb and upgrade internal core to 10Gb
– Wireless
– Storage refresh (2012)
– Review how we currently provide file and print services

Business Activities
2010
– Managed 16 Major Projects
– Transport and Parking services relocated  to Estates and Facilities Management
– Carried out several Print Audits
– University archive provided information for several high profile events including the visit og HM the Queen
2011/12
– Implement a managed staff printing service
– Review software licensing
– Venues:
       -  upgrade Octagon technical infrastructure, replace bleachers etc
       -  Drama Studio increasing  support to academic activities

Phew - that's quite a list. On top of all of that we're continuing to introduce service management by developing and reviewing our change, incident and problem procedures; setting up Service Advisory groups to support our Service Strategy Board; reviewing our Business Continuity procuedure; developing a methodology for understanding the cost of our services.  Last, but certainly not least, developing and investing in our staff.

Virtual ABBA

Today was a departmental meeting, and we were lucky to have the Registrar address us. He gave an excellent overview of the current situation facing us and other Universities, and the role that we can play in helping the University of Sheffield move forward. He talked about the uncertainty facing the sector, and how the successful Universities will be the ones that can seize opportunities by being agile and flexible. The need to promote collaboration and partnerships was emphasised, and how communication and staying connected will become more and more important.  As student fees rise, then the student's expectations will change, and we'll need to understand them and try and meet, or in the words of Disney, exceed them.

That was followed by a session on "Virtualisation: the new reality" delivered by Dave Speake, whch explained the progress of our virtualisation agenda - absolutely vital work which is usually completely hidden from our users, and sometimes from the rest of the department.  Pre 2010 we had around 200 physical servers whereas now we have 70 physical computers and 110 virtual ones, and by the end of this year we should have 50 physical ones and 200 virtual machines. The main advantages to us of this are:

• It's cheaper than buying and running physical machines
• Easier to manage
• Uses less electricity
• More flexible
• More reliable
• More functional
• Quicker to set up

We've also been doing a lot of work virtualising our discs We've gone from 15 different types of disc boxes with loads of discs of all types in individual computer to 2 physical disc enclosures and nearly all of our storage on NetApp discs with all of the benefits listed above. Some great work by the Infrastructure Team.

We then had a look back on what we'd achieved this year, and what we are planning to do next year, which will be the subject of another post - too long for this one!

Finally, the all important announcement of who'd won the ABBAs - the Above and Beyond Awards. I'd decided at the last minute to include pictures of all the nominees and winners, but could only get my hands on ones from parties so nearly everyone had a silly hat on, or a drink in their hand!

The winners were:


Outstanding collague Award:     John Ollerenshaw
Unsung hero Award:                  Jayne Halsey
Team Award:                             The SAP Basis team, Neil Campbell, Andy Turner and James Ibbotson

Well done to all, and the rest of the nominees.

Question time

Oh, dear - another long gap. Must try harder!  No real excuse, apart from more snow, a student occupation, and then over the last few days a bad cold.

So, a summary of last week. The student occupation took some of my time as no matter what you think about the rights of what the students were protesting about - and there was a lot of sympathy with them, it was still an incident which had to be managed. There's health and safety issues to consider, the media to deal with, teaching has to continue, even if the students are occupying teaching space either by rearranging it to different rooms, or hoping the students will let it continue without disruption and in this case they did. Anyway, that's over now, the students came out on Thursday, and in the main traveled to London to protest at the fees vote.

On Thursday I traveled to another University where I'm doing a review of their IT services - as a critical friend. I had an interesting chat with students, and with the IT staff. Next week I'm going back to talk another group of their customers - the academic staff.

Friday was our departmental meeting, and we had an external speaker - the Deputy Director of HR to tell us about the work of the HR department - very interesting. I think few of us have any idea of the range of different things they deal with.

Then we had an experiment - a question and answer session with the Executive Team - me and the 3 Assistant Directors.  A bit like Question Time. Some questions had been submitted in advance, some asked on the day. Predictably some of the questions were about communication in the department, some about the current financial situation. A nice mix, and an experiment we think we'll do again.

Friday afternoon was our Service Strategy Board, introduced as part of our Service Management process, where we look at reports from all of our Service managers, progress of our projects, and new projects. A few requests for new projects this time, including one to change the way we handle course information, allowing departments to input more data themselves. this should help to ensure that data is in the system in a timely manner, to feed into services including timetabling and on line registration. SheffUni people can find out more about the Service Strategy Board here.

Departmental meeting

Interesting departmental meeting on Friday morning - nice to see lots of people there. I gave a short presentation on the good stuff that had come out of our last World Cafes around the 5 key challenges we'd identified:

• Reducing Complexity
• Doing things differently
• Reducing Space
• Reducing our Carbon Footprint
• Diversifying Income

Lots of ideas and suggestions some of which will get fed into our planning process. We also like to get outside speakers in where we can, and this time it was the turn of the Director of the Development and Alumni Relations Office, who gave an extremely interesting and entertaining talk about the work of the office, and aspects of fundrasing, which I think is often misunderstood. Lots of good examples of why fundraising is important, and how it can make a difference, particularly to some students for whom scholarships are the only way they could afford to come to University.

An entertaining (as always) presentation on some new features of our phone system, and a look at the issues surrounding Common Timetabling were also on the agenda.

Finally we saw a demonstration of our remote assistance service. Users can initiate a chat session with an analyst on our Helpdesk through our self service pages:


who then takes details of the problem, and if necessary initiates a remote assistance session and takes control of the user's machine. One analyst can handle up to 10 consecutive sessions, it reduces time traveling to see individual users, provides easier diagnosis and resolution of problems, and is a much less frustrating experience for the user, who doesn't have to be asked to do things they're not comfortable with. An excellent service which we're now starting to promote heavily.

Energy and Carbon Management

One of the agenda items from the User Group that I didn't post about yesterday was our Print Management Team. This was established following our Environmental printing Review last year, and is made up of staff from CiCS, Estates (Environment team), Procurement and an academic department. Its main objective is to reduce the environmental impact of printing - to print less on more appropriate devices. They are promoting and sharing best practice, reviewing and rationalising the range of imaging equipment we have, and reducing the cost of print. this is a favourite hobby hose of mine, and print has a significant environmental impact - in 2007/08 the University printed 40m A4 sheets of paper of which only 34% was recycled, used 1,300 toner cartridges and produced 448.77 tonnes of CO2 from imaging.

The try and address this, the team are carrying out a series of print audits where they spend some time in departments carrying out a review of the departments printing needs and how they actually print, and producing a set of recommendations. This will result in an audit toolkit which will be on-line and anyone will be able to use it to look at issues such as total cost of ownership of different devices.

Today this was put into perspective as we had a departmental meeting, and had a presentation from the University Energy Manager on Carbon and Energy Management. One of the main Climate Change Act targets is for a national 34% reduction in greenhouse gas by 2020. HEFCE, our funding council, in its Strategy for Carbon Reduction in Higher Education aims to ensure that HE meets, and if possible exceeds, the government targets. There will be "funding incentives" to encourage us to meet the targets (fines if we don't??).

Like all HEIs we have an enormous utilities bill of many millions of pounds, and the bulk of our carbon emissions come from electricity. Apparently our carbon emission volume is equivalent to filling 520 Arts Towers!

So, how do we achieve the our carbon management objectives, and how do we reconcile business growth with carbon reduction? We need to embed a low carbon vision into all of our corporate strategies, management our space better and improve the efficiency of our building stock by investing in improved controls and equipment. We also need to work differently which will require significant behaviour and culture changes from all of us - staff, students, visitors and our suppliers. Some difficult decisions will be need to be taken.

We don't provide the systems anymore.....

Departmental meeting today - about 160 of the department got together first thing this morning, and we were very lucky to have a visit from our Vice Chancellor. He spoke about a number of issues affecting the University at the moment including the financial climate, the effect a change of government might have, the possibility of changes to student fees and consequent changes to the funding mechanisms. As a University we're in a much better financial position now as we've saved a lot of staff costs over the past few weeks, but there are still challenging times ahead. He also (very kindly and with no prompting from me) told the staff what a good job he thought they were doing and how much our services are respected and appreciated. Excellent start to the day.

We also had presentations on CampusM (blogged about last week), and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. We're pushing the latter a bit at the moment because we're already starting to see the effects of the changing attitudes to using technologies that we don't supply. So for example, we've just launched a major collaborative space with blogs, wikis, discussion boards etc, and one of our research groups has just launched their own based on a piece of free open source software. What do we do? Ours is secure, authenticated, backed up, supported etc. There's doesn't link to any of our systems, and probably isn't as secure. How do we broach it with them? Should we?

We also looked at students' use of technology and how easy it is for them to create content using relatively simple tools, like this video which won a recent MMUBS Podcast Competition:



Of course another great example is the IC Girls video, filmed surreptitiously in the IC and edited in someone's bedroom on iMovie - a great piece of film!

Waterloo

Departmental meeting last Friday - I really enjoy them - nice to see so much of the department together. We looked back over the last year and what we'd achieved, and looked forward to our two new strategies: Technology and Learning and Teaching. We had a presentation on action taken following recent surveys of our services, and launched our new liaison service. This will have 3 strands - strategic, technical and community. We also had a demonstration of our new collaboration product - uSpace.

I was pleased to present a number of long service awards to staff who'd been with us 30 years, and to one who'd completed 40 years service. Finally, this was the first occasion that we had our "above and beyond awards" for staff who had given that extra level of service. These have rapidly become know as the ABBAs, so maybe I should invest in a number of Mamma Mia DVDs to give out next time. Following the success of the karyoke at the Christmas Party, perhaps I should make it the sing-a-long version.

Customer Service

At our recent departmental meeting, we had another play with our voting handsets, this time looking at customer service, and trying to answer a few simple (!) questions.

If people experience bad customer service, how many people will they tell - 5, 8, or 10? Answer, 10
If people experience good customer service, how many people will they tell - 5, 8, or 10? Answer, 5
If 20 people experience bad customer service from you, how many of them will tell you - 1, 4, 15, 18? Answer, 1

Most people got the first couple right, but not the last one, where the majority went for 18 or 4.
We also asked people whether they though Customer Service was part of their job, and 86% did. We were a bit worried that 50% of our Executive team thought that Customer Service wasn't part of their job, until we looked closer at the results and realised that 8 people were voting as members of the exec - and there are only 4 of us! Thanks jokers, whoever you are (I have my suspicions...)

We're introducing a number of measures to improve customer service - not that we are in any way suggesting that it's particularly bad, but it's always good to get better. We also have to remember that we are customers as well, I want a happy, well motivated staff with good morale who enjoy their jobs. Some recent ideas include a virtual suggestions box, long service awards and departmental above and beyond awards - which were immediately christened ABBAs by the table to my right!

Departmental Drama

The departmental meeting today was in the Drama Studio. Luckily the seats were out of the auditorium, so we were able to have tables and our customary pastries and fruit for breakfast. It was great.


The Drama Studio Manager gave us a very interesting talk about the history and current operation of the theatre. As you can tell from the picture, it used to be a church - Glossop Road Baptist Church to be exact. It was opened in 1871, and became the University Drama Studio in 1970.

Interestingly for a Baptist Church it was very ornate inside, as this picture shows.

Now it is a fully functioning theatre serving the needs of students doing our drama courses, the Student Union Theatre Society, and local amateur dramatic groups (including one I'm involved with - shameless plug here). It has modern sound and lighting systems, a recording studio, media server, rehearsal rooms, and a versatile auditorium that can be set out in a number of ways, including thrust, arena and cabaret style. It's a great asset to the University, and a number of our former students who've performed in it have gone on to do great things, including Stephen Daldry and Eddie Izzard.

Back to work

Straight back to work and a departmental meeting first thing. Presentations on the recent telephone upgrade (which went very well - thanks guys), sustainable computing, the new self service helpdesk (going live very soon), projectslite ( a way of managing smaller projects and pieces of work without using the full suite of project management tools), and the University records and archives (an interesting look at some of the records out records manager has discovered in the archives - lots of fascinating insights into the history of the University). Nice to see everyone and catch up.

Spent the afternoon interviewing for some new University posts, and am about to dash off and do the same thing for 4.5 hours this morning - good job I kept up with my email while I was away last week. Then tonight I'm off to London so that I can spend tomorrow at one of my favourite events - the Chelsea Flower Show!

Departmental vision, and why women think departmental meetings are more interesting than men....

A departmental meeting today, and an opportunity to launch our new vision statement for the department. Following the two meetings we had to discuss it, we've made a couple of changes, and it's now in a final and agreed form of:

"We will be an innovative and influential department, respected by the University and recognised as a leader in the sector, delivering excellent customer-focused services."

So, now all we have to do is get there! Strategies covering all of our services are being worked on in the different sections, and individual objectives were set during the SRDS progress, with team objectives currently being put together. We had a Programme Board meeting this afternoon where we discussed how all of this will knit together, and how the Programme Plan will fit in. It is our intention that we will have a joined up set of documents which will be published on the web for everyone to see - more news on that later.

Other items covered at the meeting were the University restructuring and how that might affect us, a review of the past year, and a demonstration of Zimbra, the open source collaboration software that we're piloting at the moment. All presentations will be put in the cics-staff group in MUSE later this week.

One of the points to come out of the departmental vision meetings was a need to improve internal communication. In order to gather some information about current practices, we used the voting handsets and software and asked a series of questions - after first having asked what section people were in, how old they were and their sex. There were some interesting results. I'm very worried that 14% of people never speak to a member of the Executive, (presumably not even their Assistant Director), not even once a year at the Christmas Party! We will have to get out more. If any of you would like to come and say hello to me, please do.

63% of people at the meeting read this blog either regularly or occasionally, but only 31% find it useful. Let me know what would make it more useful!

Some interesting differences between sections, age and gender. For example, 63% of women thought that the departmental meetings were very useful as a method of communication, but only 31% of men did.

All the results are being looked at, and we'll be making some recommendations for improvements. However, communication is a two way process and some of it will be down to you - we can make information available to you, but we can't make you look at it. For example 12% of staff surveyed never read Just for CiCS, 36% never read this blog, 33% never access the cics-staff MUSE group and 59% never use myChat. But you can then throw back at me the fact that 35% of staff don't have regular team meetings! This will have to change.

I think it will be interesting to repeat the same questions this time next year, and see if we've improved at all.

Departmental Vision

Welcome back, and a Happy New Year to you all. I hope your break was a good one, and you’re ready to face 2008!

There are number of exciting developments happening this year, and I’ll be posting about some of them over the next few weeks. To start the New Year off, we will be launching a new departmental vision statement. As many of you know, we’ve had a couple of meetings recently to allow all of the department to comment on and contribute to it. The final one was this afternoon. The meetings were in “world café” format – round tables with a mix of staff from different areas of the department.

The Vision Statement which was put forward by the Executive Team was:

“We will be an innovative and influential department, trusted by the University and recognised as leading in the sector, delivering excellent customer-focused services”

The 6 words or phrases highlighted were discussed on 6 tables, with people moving round so that everyone got the chance to discuss all or most of the words. I was interested in whether people thought the words were appropriate, what they meant to everyone, and whether there were alternative words which might be better. We also wanted to know how people thought we could achieve the vision, what did it mean to them and what changes or support might be needed to achieve it.

Paper tablecloths were used for writing on, and it was very pleasing to see lively discussions taking place on all tables.

All of the writing and conclusions are being typed up, and we’ll be using them over the next couple of weeks to refine the statement – which will be launched at the next departmental meeting – and provide feedback to everyone who attended, as well as those who didn’t.

First results seem to indicate that on the whole people are happy with the vision statement, although both groups disliked the word “trusted”. One group commented that by putting it in the vision, it implied we weren’t trusted at the moment. Another group suggested that “respected’ might be better.

Thanks to everyone who attended and took part, and I hope it was an enjoyable and useful event.