Planning, recruiting and degree ceremonies

Earlier this week we had a Service Strategy Board where we had a look at the key objectives for next year for each of our Service Areas. Some key things coming up including our VLE review, a new digital media hosting solution,  implementing our new teaching and learning strategy, a new BI/MI solution, our new research IT support team - and many more! Over the last couple of days me and the rest of the departmental executive team have been on an awayday pulling all of this together, as well as adding in other big initiatives including digital transformation, into our strategic plan for next year. Our theme is capability - helping the University achieve its business objectives by increasing its capability and capacity to do things.

Capability came into our other set of discussions over the last couple of days, which was about looking at how we can increase the pool of people we recruit from in order to increase diversity. We talked about recruiting for potential and capability, rather than just for skills people have on the day, and being more flexible in our recruitment practices.

One disadvantage of being away over the last couple of days was missing our winter degree ceremonies. As usual we record and stream live all of the ceremonies, as well as producing DVDs, USB sticks and our famous handshake videos.

A real team effort - thanks to everyone. Here's some photos from the day to give you a flavour of what's involved.

The AV team suited and booted ready to operate the cameras

A view from behind camera one

Some of the backstage production kit

And the creative mediateam producing the recordings

Well done everyone involved!!

Planning and Digifest

The end of last week was a bit of a blur. I had a lot of meetings, and we had to get out planning statement in on Friday. This is the document which sets out what we're going to do next year, and what resources we need to deliver it. A lot in it about our proposed new Research IT Support service, and also many developments in Digital Learning. I'll distill everything down tothe key points sometime this week and post up a summary.

Also met with two more of our faculties for our Strategic Liaison meetings - both went very well.

Now I'm in Birmingham for Digifest - JISCs Digital festival. Last year it was excellent, so I'm looking forward to it.  All of the keynotes and many of the sessions are streamed for free on line - you can register to see them here.

Planning, stakeholders and Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Priorities

We've started our new year round of Strategic Planning with the Faculties - exchanging information about their planning priorities and ours so that when we come to submit them as part of the planning round, they are complementary to each other. Currently our plans consist of 5 priorities in three areas  - new developments, business as usual and things to change. These will be discussed and refined over the next couple of weeks with fellow Professional Service Directors and colleagues from Faculties. So, here's our first pass:

 
Priorities
Research support
- provide and manage the key elements of IT infrastructure that are needed to support effective research and innovation (network, storage, HPC, support) as a central facility, which will for a high level of standard delivery be free at the point of use.
Infrastructure
- invest in the development, build and design of our IT infrastructure (especially in storage, as a major priority in the coming year) to enhance the University's strategic agility, as well as the  sustainability and cost effectiveness of the Universities key business area
IT and information Security
- accelerate the rollout of information and IT security training and awareness, together with increasing our ability to protect the University’s information resources due to increased risk of cybersecurity threats and compliance challenges.
   
Learning and teaching
- develop a new model for supporting learning and teaching working with learning technologists in departments, research innovative and flexible use of space, improve availability of the learning platform, review lecture capture and other teaching technologies,  improve digital literacy of staff

Student system review
- play a major role in the review of the student system including scoping requirements, reviewing and mapping current business processes and market testing of available systems

Business as usual
Mobile
- ensure that all services are appropriate to the devices used by our users

Wireless
- accelerate wireless rollout to cover 90% of campus by end of 2015

Support the University’s Digital presence
-  including MOOCS, iTunesU, new website

Sustainability
- an increasing number of services to support and critical nature of IT systems to the University's business, mean that new services have to be sustainable, scalable and resilient.

Process improvement
- continuous improvement of University processes to improve efficiency and provide better services

Things to change
Digital by design
- think digital first. Don't take paper based processes and digitise them. Design digital processes so that customers prefer to use them.

Service management
- develop new service portfolio and use this to implement industry standard best practice service management processes

Civic engagement
- better resource the way we support and enhance events through the innovative uses of technology

IT service delivery model
- implement more efficient means of delivering IT services across the university, to reduce duplication of effort, improve quality of service, improve compliance, and build more effective career pathways for IT staff

How we collaborate
- make better use of the collaborative technologies available, including google apps, to work more effectively.

Services, Planning and Water

When  we introduced Service Management a few years ago, one of the first things we did was construct a Service Catalogue, and divide our services into seven categories, each one having a Service Manager and Service Advisory Board.  Recently we began looking at constructing a service portfolio, which has a different audience and purpose, and as part of that it was natural that we review whether our service areas are correct and still fit for purpose. We come up with a new suggested structure, and have started to look at how it might work, and yesterday our Service Managers and Process Owners met for a first look at it. The portfolio is written very much from a service and value perspective - what do we do that adds value to our customers, and I think we've made a very good start. Lots more work to so though - watch this space.

We've also started to look at our plans for next year, and the first thing we do is look at our top five priorities in the following areas:
New developments
Business as usual
Things to change.
Its a nice easy way of focusing the mind on what we want to achieve, and we've put together a first draft which will get refined over the next few weeks and incorporated into our final planning statement.

Today I've been to Oxford as I'm on the University IT Committee  - always interesting to see how another place works, and also to give them some helpful advice if they're doing something we've already been through. Implementation of major new Business Systems is something they're in the middle of, and Information Security also high on their agenda, as indeed it is on ours. One of the advantages of a long train journey is the amount of work I can done on it, including reading lots of papers - about the only time I get chance. Although yesterday I spent the latter part of the journey looking out of the window at the water everywhere - there were times when the train looked as though it was going through a lake!

Our Plan

I think our new Strategic Plan web page is looking great. As well as a video from the VC about what we are and what we aspire to be as a University, there's some excellent case studies illustrating our guiding principles which are:

Achieving Excellence
Cultivating Ambition
Making a Difference
Working Together
Protecting the Future
Leading the Way

These range from the  power of solar magnetic tornadoes, to providing free legal advice for the local community, to research on the social effects of alcohol pricing.  Well worth a read.

No time for lunch.....

Today was a mammoth day of meetings. This morning we got together with the Service Managers to look at how we will put together our plans for the coming year. Instead of a fairly detailed plan of aims, objectives and a list of tasks, we're going for a very high level list of aims for the year published on our web site, with a detailed operational level plan within each service area. This will be a constantly updated Google doc with timescales, priorities etc which the whole department can refer to. It should be simpler and more transparent both for our customers to understand, and CiCS staff.

Then I had a presentation from a company who had recently carried out a benchmarking survey for us. Two other Russell Group Universities had taken part, and the company was also able to compare us with other sectors. A whole range of things were looked at, and a lot of data had been collected and fed through to them. Importantly, the study was not just about cost - it also looked at people, processes, complexity, service delivery and volume.

In order to keep the scope manageable, we had chosen the following areas:

Desktop Services
  -  Email Services
  -  Printing Services
Server Management
  -  Storage Services
Data Centre Services
Student Records System

I haven't yet shared the results with the rest if the department so don't want to go into detail here, but I think it's safe to say that in general we are very cost effective. :-)
Issues were raised with us around complexity in some areas, and the lack of metrics for some of our service. The latter is something we are aware of and addressing. I'm glad to say that our email costs are very significantly lower than our peer group, but our printer costs are higher, hence our move to a more sustainable print service.
The company had also interviewed a selection of users, and their comments reflected very much what had come out of our recent staff survey.

This was the subject of my last meeting - going though all of the results of the staff survey with the service managers. Each had picked out themes in their areas and suggested actions to rectify issues which had been raised where possible. Some common themes included communication (it is either too much, or too little), poor interfaces into systems (some are packages, some of our own in-house written ones - both came in for as much criticism I think),  browser compatibility of applications. There was also a general perception that we didn't consult enough, an we do wonder whether we have lost touch somewhat from our academic departments, focusing too much on consultation and discussion at faulty level? Whatever the cause, we will be getting out much more to talk to people.

Busy day  - I think some of us were in meetings for just over 7 hours, but all very worthwhile and all achieved something.

Planning and strategies

Last week I posted about our five priorities, things we would change and business as normal activities for the next academic year. Today was the first of our joint planning meetings with our faculty colleagues who presented us with their drivers for change and areas for support, and we got to see if our plans aligned with theirs. I'm pleased to see that in the main ours did, with wireless and mobile delivery of services very high on their list of priorities. Some other areas for us to think about, including how we deliver distance learning  - through a central unit or devolved to faculties/departments.

Yesterday we had an extended SSB meeting. Several of our new service strategies are nearing completion, and we had a look at the ones for Communication and Collaboration, Help, Support and Training, and Printing. We also revisited our strategies for Teaching and Learning Support and Support for Research and Innovation which were approved some time ago. Others are being prepared, and we will soon have a suite of them for different services, with an overarching introduction to pull them together, instead of a traditional IT Strategy. Hopefully they will all be on our web site soon.
We also had our regular look at project progress, addressed priorities in areas where we have a lot of work coming in, went through our Service Improvement Report, and considered how we publicise our "business as usual" work to the University. A very full meeting! Lots of stuff going on, but too much work coming in for us to do, so we are looking at different ways of delivering and how we can be more transparent in our prioritisation process.

Tonight I'm supporting our students - last night at 1930 a group of them were given the title of a musical, and tonight they have to put it on at The Crucible. Build the set, learn the lines, rehearse etc - all for charity. Will report on it later!

Priorities and Bitesize

A rare morning - no meetings! was able to catch up on lots of reading, and finalise some information for a planning meeting with other Directors of Services and our Faculty colleagues. As a starting point for discussion, we've been asked to come up with our top five priorities, our top five business as usual activities, and our top five things to change. So, in no particular order, here is our first draft:

Priorities for 2013/14



1  Wireless Everywhere

2  Delivery of IT Support
3  Planning the space in the New Engineering Building

4  Sustainability
     - Green: print, carbon, cooling
     - Services: simplification and standardisation
5  Mobile
   - Service delivery

Top 5 Business as usual activities

1  Improve student related processes including review of student system
2  Review of teaching technologies and support including lecture capture
3  Future proofing of core infrastructure
4  Continuous process improvement  - Process Improvement Unit and facilitation of departmental networks
5  Support for research

Top 5 Things to change

1 How we deliver research infrastructure
2 The way we use teaching space
3 Access to systems and services ( including new portal and identity management)
4 How we collaborate (post-uspace, google apps, others, skills)
5 Transparency of project prioritisation


This will now be shared and discussed with colleagues in CiCS and other departments before our final plans are submitted to the University in March.


The other thing a morning free of meetings allowed me to catch up on, was the first of our "bitesize" sessions we're delivering to students in the Information Commons. It was held yesterday and was about creating videos - recorded so that anyone who missed it can watch it on the IC Blog. I watched it and learned a lot! More are planned  -  keep your eye on the IC blog for details.

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

Best in the world - almost.

Today I was at a University Executive Awayday. Discussing planning, we focused on barriers to achieving the University Strategic plan. Very interesting, and a number of common themes. Some of the things of interest to me included complexity of processes, the need to simplify and understand data flows in the student, teaching and learning systems, research data storage and our interaction and alignment with the Faculties. Lots to talk about on all of them, and all being addressed.

We also discussed a review we'll be starting soon of our Student Information System - we implemented it some time ago and the time is right to look at the future development of it, and whether we should be looking at a package, or another solution - best of breed modules or a shared service development for example. I did try and get them to agree that any implementation of a new system would be after I retired, but they didn't seem too keen on the idea!

Finally -  a piece of really good news. The University commissions iGraduate to carry out a student and international student barometer, where the results get compared against other Universities across the world so some form of benchmarking can take place.  Yesterday the results from the Autumn 2011 survey were fed back

The headlines were;

For the student barometer CiCS scored 96.2% satisfaction, which means we were ranked as number 1 IT dept (in terms of student satisfaction) in the Russell Group and the UK.

In the international student barometer CiCS scored 96.1% satisfaction, which means we were ranked as number 2  in the world, and number 1 in the UK.

 

Not bad eh??  Well done to everyone - a fantastic result.

You put your whole self in...

Still busy at the moment with the Planning Round - the annual exercise where we all set out our targets and strategies..  I posted last week that we had draft planning statement, which sits above our operational plans, and that we would be taking it out to the five faculties so that we can make sure we're responding to what they want to do, and that they're aware of ours. We've had three meetings so far, two more to go next week, then we can work on the final plan. Alongside this we're working on our financial forecasts for next year and our projected out-turn for this.  It's certainly keeping us busy!

Today I had an interesting discussion about our departmental use of social media. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, which are both becoming increasingly popular, and we're obviously reviewing and learning from what we do. Today we were chatting about how we capture faults, problems, issues etc reported though social media so that we don't lose the information, and it's included in our logging and reporting mechanisms. We also talked about how to balance the informative nature of our tweets, ie communicating with our customers, and the internal "chat" that sometimes happens. I think sometimes people forget that @CiCS is actually a person, and not a generic account! 

Finally, tonight I walked back from  meeting to my office, to find a coupe of hundred students doing the Okey-Kokey (is that how you spell it?) on the concourse - presumably to celebrate the end of the elections for the new student sabbatical officers. It was a great sight!

Planning

We're busy planning this week - we're right in the middle of the planning round, and producing our plan for next year, as well as having a look a back at what we've achieved from last year's objectives.  Then we take our plan and go out and meet all of the Faculties, talk to them about theirs, and refine our if necessary. Lots of good stuff in it so far including implementing our eLearning strategy, refreshing our Research Support strategy, developing further our mobile and web strategies and completing a number of projects with impenetrable acronyms (HEAR, SHIP, DARE, KIS). Lots more, and I'll publish bits of it when completed.

Also this week we've been looking at a possible structure for a Programme Board to pull together some of the projects associated with the utilisation of resources, particularly teaching space, such as Common Timetabling and other data related projects including those looking at how we handle programme regulations. Accurate, timely data is a key prequisite for many other processes, including timetabling.

Yesterday it was a UEB/HoDS meeting, where the Heads of Academic Departments, the Directors of Professional Services and the University Executive Board get together. A key part of the meeting yesterday looked at the purpose of the meeting,  what topics we might discuss in future, and how meeting s might be facilitated.  Interesting round table discussions, with the key point being that this is one of the few times these three sets of people get together, and the time should be used as interactively as possible, to hear others opinions, to generate ideas, and to bridge any gulf between the academic community and professional services.

Setting off later for an awayday of RUGIT - the Russell group of IT Directors where we'll be discussing topics including Innovation, VLEs and beyond, Governance and Organisation, and getting an update on what's happening in JISC.  All good stuff. Blogposts will follow!

Not an awayday

Last Friday myself and the three Assistant Directors spent a few hours of quality time together in an awayday follow up. Every year we try and have one or two days of facilitated training and planning away from Sheffield,  and then a couple of days during the year to follow up on how we're getting on with our actions. We didn't actually go away, and we didn't have a full day, but called it an awayday all the same!

We spent some time reflecting on the last 6 months, identifying achievements and frustrations. Although there were some frustrations we could point to, there were many achievements, and even the frustrating experiences had led to a lot of learning, especially things that we could do better to stop them happening again.  We also looked forward to our current planning round, and in particular how we can prioritise better - we need to include everything in our prioritisation processes, and be much more transparent. Our staff also need support in being able to say no - we never have the resources to do everything that we're asked to do, but need to make sure that we target our resources to supporting key University objectives effectively.

We also talked about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - how do we know we're being successful, and delivering what our customers want? Do we really know how well we're doing?

A useful few hours as always, but lots of actions coming out of it which we're going to work on over the next few weeks.

Scenario planning and baking with cats

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Controlling and Warmth

Admin Team Awayday today - that's Heads, Directors, some Deputy Directors of Professional Services, and the Faculty Directors of Operations.  Quite a big group, and good to get some quality time together. Today was about planning - looking at the external environment, sharing our plans, and  looking at some financial issues.  Lots of good stuff shared, and I think we all enjoyed looking at the different plans and seeing where they interact.

Lots of common points made - some key themes about where we're trying to get to as Professional Services. In the climate of increased competition, we need to be distinctive, and we had a lot of discussion about what differentiates us from other Universities, and how we can market that. The University of Warmth was suggested as a strapline...

We had a long discussion about what we as professional services need to be better at - communication, team working, getting rid of silos. Simplifying processes, only doing what we have to do, stopping doing anything which doesn't add value. Looking at different ways of providing services - which may not be by us. Getting rid of unnecessary reviews and policies. Understanding what we do, what activities we support and what services we offer. Knowing our costs- how much does it cost us to provide services? Working in partnership and collaboration with academic colleagues. Breaking down any "us and them" mentality, especially around the "we earn the money, they spend it" opinion of some academic areas. As someone said, we'll know we've succeeded when no-one refers to "the University" as if somehow they're not part of it. And my favourite phrase "The Centre".

That's not to say we don't do any of the above of course - we do a lot of it very well. But we need to get better, and smarter. I managed to get my favourite word in - mandation! It came up at the Modernisation and Efficiency meeting, and I rather liked it. Of course it's all about how much people can be told they have to do things a certain way, rather than suggesting, or encouraging them to change.  It's an interesting balance. My own experience is that you can tell people what they have to do, if it's clearly explained why, and they can see the benefits to them. But it is clearly dependent on the situation. It was reported to us that one University, not in this country, has a Department of Controlling. I'd love to be head of that one....

From Drama to Bums on Seats

Quite a lot of meetings to catch up on, so here's a quick round up.

Friday morning was the Drama Studio User Group, which we effectively disbanded!  Well, in its current form. Rather than try and look at operational issues, management and policy, the group will reform and look at operational issues, becoming a consultative groups for all users of the Drama Studio. There's a wide range of them - academic departments, students, local amateur dramatic groups, and we'll be meeting for some of the time in the evening to make sure all users are represented.

Then on Friday afternoon the Exec spent 2 hours going through our operational plan and prioritising all of the different objectives to present to the Service Strategy Board for their comments. A big job, and interesting to see where we might have different views to the managers who have put it together. In these tight financial times, and where our users want more services than ever, it's important we get this right.

Today I had the first meeting of an important project - we're calling it IT as a Shared Service, and it will be looking at how CiCS and Faculty and departmental IT staff can work more closely together. Lots of benefits to be had if we get this right including better IT support in departments, efficiency, less duplication, better career development for staff.

Then this afternoon it was the Service Strategy Board.  Lots of good discussion. Topics covered included how we're coordinating improvements to the registration process for new students, how we ensure development work done outside of the development team gets the right technical advice and progress on all of our projects. No new projects to approve today, but one "lessons leaned" review which we carry out on all completed projects.

Each month for  the  meeting of the SSB the service manager produces an overview report of their own area - not just projects, but other developments and significant changes. These are invaluable for me and the rest of the team to keep up with everything happening in the department. I can't summarise all seven of them here, so I thought I'd highlight one or two after each meeting. Today it's the turn of  Teaching and Learning, and the following new developments were reported:

• Managed laptop service being piloted to allow departments to use space more flexibly, eg using teaching labs as IT spaces

• New PC availability service (or Bums on Seats as it's affectionately known in the dept) which will graphically show individual PCs on each floor in the IC and display availability status. This will be linked with the PC booking system so you can walk into the building and book a PC on level 0 and it will be ready for you as you reach the higher levels

• Creative media space opening in the IC where students will be able to produce audio and video material

• Laptop loan service in IC being piloted

All good stuff and well done to everyone.

Off to Loughborough tomorrow for the Google Apps for Education UK User Group.

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

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

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

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

Operational plans, carbon targets, and why do people print so much....

One of the regular meeting the Exec team have with all of our Section Heads today. Most important item on the agenda was our operational plans for this year and next, which have been drawn up by the different sections under our seven service headings. Next task is to amalgamate them into one plan for the department, and to look at priorities. Interesting how some priorities have changed  - as I mentioned yesterday, wireless is top of everyone's list. Lecture capture and streaming, which we do a limited amount of, was not in demand a year ago, and now is so that we will have to expand our service. Too many other things at a high priority to list here - the difficulty will be finding the resources to deliver them!

We also talked about projects to enhance the student experience (very important in the light of higher fees), how to improve and speed up decision making in the department, and our great Vice-Chancellor's open forums, which are highly recommended.

This afternoon it was the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee, where the main topic of discussion was reducing our carbon emissions. Lots of work already done, but a lot more still to do. We're picking off the buildings on campus which have a high energy consumption and concentrating on them. Of course, the buildings which consume the most energy per square metre are our two data centres - despite all the good work we've done on virtualisation and layout etc. But, lots of good things planned to improve the air con etc.  Paradoxically one of the other buildings with a high energy consumption, is the one doing all of our research on energy and climate change.

The other big agenda item was developing our sustainable procurement policy - we already have a policy on ethical sourcing, fair trade, supporting local businesses, and this will build on that. There's a lot of work to do looking at the environmental impact of our suppliers.

Finally, I managed to get a plug in for our managed printing project, which should reduce the amount we print, and make that which we do more efficient. People still seem to print everything - including the covering emails with the agenda attachments (you know the ones - please find attached, etc, etc.....  And they print everything single sided. And powerpoint slides on a whole page with solid blocks of colour.  Grrrr