Who stole the stairs?

It's a long standing joke that if you turn up to a University meeting and there's more people there than you expect, someone will ask who's put car parking on the agenda. It's an emotive subject, and one that's difficult to win on. Yesterday I had a very pleasant meeting with our campus wardens - they have the thankless task of patrolling the campus making sure everyone is parked correctly, and displaying the right permits, as well as making sure the campus is a tidy and welcoming place for visitors. The meeting was slightly late starting as some of them shared the news that during the night the metal stairs at the back of one of our buildings had been stolen - literally sawn off and taken.

The difficulties of their work is borne out by the comments in the recent staff survey I referred to in my last post - many commenters complaining that we didn't have enough visitor car parking spaces. An almost equal number complaining that we had too many visitor car parking spaces. Lots of "we haven't enough car parking spaces" , and some "we've got too many spaces for cars, we need more for bikes" - although not as many.

We're looking at different ways of managing car parking - at the moment we have a complex system of permits in three categories, and one change we might make is more "pay on the day"spaces. Or maybe we should have all pay and display? Or just let everyone who wants one buy a permit and then hunt for a space? It doesn't matter what we do, it will generate a lot of heated debate, and probably please nobody!

Cultivating, parking and housing

Busy day today - spent the morning scoring promotion cases. I'm heavily involved with the HR process around promotions and contribution awards and on 3 panels for each. Lots and lots of cases to read and score. Hard work, but I enjoy it - keeps me in touch with what other departments do, and with HR processes and policies.

This afternoon we had a presentation and discussion with Cultivate, a company who assist their clients in the adoption of innovative technologies across their campuses. Some very interesting insights into the issues around technology adoption, particularly the "what's in in for me" syndrome. Some of their outputs were very visual and creative, and would appeal to the non technologists looking for the business slant rather than the the IT one. We will be considering whether we might use them to help us with some of our new projects.

Then we had a Programme Board, looking at progress with our existing projects, proposals for new projects and project closures. Good progress on most projects, but as always some delays due almost totally to resource issues. Only 2 new projects approved - one is a feasibilty study into a pay-on-the-day parking scheme Currently staff pay a yearly fee for a parking permit, no matter how many times they bring their car in. A pay on the day scheme might be fairer to part-time staff and might encourage staff to use their cars more selectively. To walk in on nice sunny days for example. If we had any nice sunny days of course. The other project was a rewrite of our private housing system which allows private landlords to register with us and have their details accessible via a web site which students can search for appropriate properties. Our existing system was written some years ago and could do with updating, but it will have to be prioirtised along with all of the other student related projects we have.

Don't mention the war...

Programme Board today - progress on all of our projects looked at and commented on, and as usual, the main issue was how we resource them all as well as continue to support existing services. A couple of new projects were approved. One was to look at scanning technology - initially we need to gather user requirements for a scanning solution across the University. We already know of specific areas where such a solution is needed – Livelink, SAP and Academic Departments where storage spaces is limited. We also need to draw up guidelines for the use of a scanning solution based in part on user requirements, and partly on best practice drawn from across the document management sector, both inside and outside HE. this part of the project is about to start, and then we aim to evaluate the leading scanning solutions and draw up a shortlist. However, this can only be done when we have available resources.

The second project we approved today is an evaluation of a 'Pay on the Day" parking permit scheme to replace the current situation where staff pay for a parking permit for unlimited use throughout the year. It's hoped that this scheme will incentivise people to leave their car at home occasionally if they only pay for actual usage of the car parks. Of course, in a University like ours, with many car parks, many of them small areas behind buildings, this will pose a number of challenges! There's a number of areas where we'll have to carry out some work - finding the most appropriate mechanism to charge people in controlled and uncontrolled, car parks, collecting the data collected from barriers, informing staff of what use they've made of the car parks, and charging them direct from the payroll. This proposal is still being discussed with the appropriate bodies in the University, but we need to start doing the evaluation work now.