Having met the new Chief Executive of JISC at RUGIT the other day, yesterday I was pleased to welcome him to Sheffield. We had a really good discussion with our CFO about the future of JISC, especially around funding arrangements, and then I chatted with him about our plans and strateies and the issues we were facing. Of course, I took the opportunity to show him round our excellent learning spaces - The Information Commons and The Diamond. I think he was impressed ;-) As well he should be - they are some of the best technology enhanced learning spaces in the UK, of course, I might be biased, but I'm sure I'm right.
Later in the afternoon we had a meeting of our Service Strategy Board to look at how we prioritise projects. Considering a number of criteria including alignment to strategic goals and impact, we played an interesting game of "Play Your Cards Right", for those old enough to remember it. Having all the projects written on cards, we placed one in the middle of the table, then ordered the others either higher or lower. We got to an agreed list in the end. But of course, that doesn't necessarily mean thats' the order we will do them in, as so many other things impact on that. The resources needed, deadlines, availabilty of resources - all come into play.
Finally this week we had a very productive meeting with the Students Union about how we might work closer with them on a number of digital projects. My dream is to be able to order a coffee from Coffee Revolution from my desk, walk over to the SU, find a table and sit down and have it delivered to me. Apparently we're not that far off :-)
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Friday, 20 November 2015
Thursday, 18 September 2014
Conferences, food tasting and project assurance
The last couple of days I've spent on conference organising business in preparation for the main UCISA conference in March 2015. So in a whistlestop tour of Edinburgh I've visited two hotels including checking out the different rooms, the conference centre including looking at entrances, exits, pedestrian routes and layouts, and the dinner venues. As well as getting a good speaker programme together, with keynotes, workshops, showcases and poster sessions, the 'environmental' factors are extremely important
You can have the best speakers around, but if the rooms are wrong, the food bad, or the coffee undrinkable, that's what people remember. We've had more complaints about the quality of the coffee than almost anything else! It's also important to make sure everyone is catered for, and in some recent conferences the quality of the vegetarian food has been particularly poor. A few years ago the lunch choice for vegetarians was fish and pasta....
So, in a very hard task, we now taste all of the menus in advance and choose what we're going to have. Can't remember how many canapés, starters, mains and deserts I've tasted over the last couple of days. But I know I've put weight on! I've also met with an events company to theme one of the dinners which looks as though it's going to be exciting. It's all coming together now, with just a few more speakers to confirm, it should be a great event.
Today I've been at the UCISA Executive meeting, where most of the agenda was taken up discussing in detail the change in charitable status of UCISA, more of which here.
We also looked at the progress of the many UCISA groups who organise many events and produce some very high quality publications and toolkits. One of the latest is on Major Project Governance assessment, which you can find here.
It has been very well received and colleagues from Sheffield have contributed to it.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
You can have the best speakers around, but if the rooms are wrong, the food bad, or the coffee undrinkable, that's what people remember. We've had more complaints about the quality of the coffee than almost anything else! It's also important to make sure everyone is catered for, and in some recent conferences the quality of the vegetarian food has been particularly poor. A few years ago the lunch choice for vegetarians was fish and pasta....
So, in a very hard task, we now taste all of the menus in advance and choose what we're going to have. Can't remember how many canapés, starters, mains and deserts I've tasted over the last couple of days. But I know I've put weight on! I've also met with an events company to theme one of the dinners which looks as though it's going to be exciting. It's all coming together now, with just a few more speakers to confirm, it should be a great event.
Today I've been at the UCISA Executive meeting, where most of the agenda was taken up discussing in detail the change in charitable status of UCISA, more of which here.
We also looked at the progress of the many UCISA groups who organise many events and produce some very high quality publications and toolkits. One of the latest is on Major Project Governance assessment, which you can find here.
It has been very well received and colleagues from Sheffield have contributed to it.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Monday, 8 September 2014
TELfest
Today is the launch of TELFest - our technology enhanced learning festival organised by the CiCS Learning Technologies team. 21 sessions on offer throughout the week, and over 800 sign ups to the various sessions. There's sessions covering MOOCs, using the VLE, Mobile learning and social media. I was chairing a panel session on the value and impact of learning technologies in Higher Education. Some lively debate and discussion on what technologies had made the biggest difference to teaching and learning, what sort of spaces we need to teach using new technologies, how we can help all staff get the skills they need to make the best use of them, and what the future might hold.
Then in the afternoon it was our Service Strategy Board where we looked at progress with our projects, some project gateways, and looked at some resource issues we have, especially around service transition, where are not always very good at operationalising new services. We also had an update on our introduction of agile project management, and you can read all about that here.
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Here am I sitting in a tin can
Another Service Strategy Board yesterday. More project progress to discuss, a couple of successful project closures, but no new projects to agree. There's a couple of joint ones we are heavily involved in which re just about to start. One between ourselves and Corporate Affairs to redesign the University website, and one with Planning and Governance Services to look at coding structures in our systems. Some other developments we discussed included where we're going on MOOCs and the provision of creative media production facilities for staff. Unified comms, including integration with Google is going to be piloted, and we've got an interesting pilot going in the Information Commons with Ideascale, ideas and innovation management software. Looks like its going well, with lots of ideas and suggestions coming in. News from all of our projects is here - as I write this it's not been updated with the latest news as the meeting was only yesterday, but it will be very soon, and we update it every month.
Other things in the last couple of days that have kept me busy include a meeting between UEB and all Heads of Departments where we had a very interesting roundtable discussion about our curricula and things which are in addition to the core subjects - interdisciplinary studies, enterprise, student activities, civic engagement.
Those of you who've followed me for a while will know how excited I am by space, and on clear dark nights I often go outside to watch the ISS pass over. Over the past few weeks I've been captivated following the commander of expedition 35, Commander Chris Hadfield on Twitter. He's been in space for 146 days, and has done more to involve people and educate them about space and the science that goes on in the ISS than any other astronaut. His photos are amazing, as are his vodcasts (one of my favourites was how you throw up in space), and the news coverage about his cover of Bowie's Space Oddity must mean that you've all seen it. Well, he and his fellow astronauts returned safely to earth today in a Russian Soyuz rocket, and Twitter won't quite be the same again!
Other things in the last couple of days that have kept me busy include a meeting between UEB and all Heads of Departments where we had a very interesting roundtable discussion about our curricula and things which are in addition to the core subjects - interdisciplinary studies, enterprise, student activities, civic engagement.
Those of you who've followed me for a while will know how excited I am by space, and on clear dark nights I often go outside to watch the ISS pass over. Over the past few weeks I've been captivated following the commander of expedition 35, Commander Chris Hadfield on Twitter. He's been in space for 146 days, and has done more to involve people and educate them about space and the science that goes on in the ISS than any other astronaut. His photos are amazing, as are his vodcasts (one of my favourites was how you throw up in space), and the news coverage about his cover of Bowie's Space Oddity must mean that you've all seen it. Well, he and his fellow astronauts returned safely to earth today in a Russian Soyuz rocket, and Twitter won't quite be the same again!
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
SSB and staff survey
Major meeting yesterday was our Service Strategy Board (SSB). Lots to discuss and a lively meeting. As usual, we had a look at the progress of all of our projects, including everything that we're trying to get in place for the start of term which I mentioned last week. Some new projects which are just starting up include development of an Open Day App, and the introduction of a text messaging service for staff and students. The first phase of this - being able to send a text message to all students in the event of an incident is almost in place, and future phases will involve targeting specific groups. we're also piloting on-line Information Security Awareness training, which will eventually be rolled out across the University. Every month we get an informative report from our Problem Manager which gives us a heads up of various types of problem. These cover resolved problems, problems unresolved with work arounds, and problems with work on-going to fix them. It also highlights areas where we may have to make policy or strategic technical changes. This time it highlighted some issuses we having around authentication/SSO via our portal and some single points of failure which might need a change to our authentication process. A good meeting as usual.
I've also had a meeting of the Professional Services Executive, where we looked at the results of a recent staff survey. We've got the headline results for the university and also in-depth analyses of our individual departments. As you'd expect, there's things we want to celebrate, things we want to improve, and things we need to investigate. We'll be doing all three in the department over the next few weeks.
I've also had a meeting of the Professional Services Executive, where we looked at the results of a recent staff survey. We've got the headline results for the university and also in-depth analyses of our individual departments. As you'd expect, there's things we want to celebrate, things we want to improve, and things we need to investigate. We'll be doing all three in the department over the next few weeks.
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Agile, Audit and Availability
Yesterday we had our monthly meeting of Service Strategy Board. We don't get project reports in August, but we had a number of items on the agenda to discuss. These included:
We're moving towards much more agile, faster development, and so we need to look at how we run and manage projects alongside this. We had a presentation on Agile Project Management which was very interesting, and well received. In summary, this involves a more iterative, collaborative development between the customer and the developers, keeping customers continually engaged and with a shared ownership of outcomes. Use of prototypes early, not waiting till all specs are finished, More consideration of different options, less getting fixed down one route early. More staging of delivery, short development cycles, release of different stages early. More harnessing of users creativity - this is particularly beneficial when prototypes are used. Of course, we already embrace some of these concepts to a greater or lesser degree, but we are now looking to increase them. With my customers hat on, I particularly welcome iterative and collaborative development using prototypes - I find it much easier to think about what I want when I can see something in front of me. For those in CiCS, there'll be more info at the next departmental meeting.
Another thing discussed was an audit of learning objects within the University. At the moment we have a range of different sorts of learning objects including audio, video, captures lectures etc, stored in a number of different places and not necessarily easily discoverable by all users. This audit will help us come up with a plan to index, catalogue and make easily available all learning content, which will be a collaborative venture between us and the Library.
As part of our Service Management implementation we looked at a proposal for Availibility Management, and the
role of Availability Manager will initially be to produce a
mechanism for automated testing on the availability of our IT services. The aim will be to provide availability information on all the IT services as defined in the service catalogue (which we also discussed at SSB as we've made a number of revisions to it). So, we 'll be putting in place automated
testing using the most appropriate
technology, but of course there'll be instances where it may not be practical to
put these in place due to overhead issues. Hopefully the
outputs of the tests will be developed into appropriate dashboards to
help improve information and therefore the quality of our services.
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Service Strategy Board
Service Strategy Board yesterday. Another good meeting - always lots to discuss. As usual we went through reports from all of our projects as well as getting reports from all of our service managers.
Particular things we looked at included:
Particular things we looked at included:
- A review of our recent filestore upgrade. This had a timeline of everything that had happened, and focused on lessons learned, and made a number of recommendations for future such events. The timing of this one hadn't been easy, it had to come before our VLE upgrade, and it did have the potential to disrupt some exams processing, which is one of the reasons the work was carried out through the night. We discussed whether we should have a dedicated upgrade/downtime window during the summer, but discounted it as it was felt that users would expect all work to be done within that period, which would carry its own risks, and it would be difficult to time. We agreed that we would probably always have to build at least one downtime window into our planning for the summer, and we would have to ensure that our customers understood the reason for this, but that we would arrange the time in order to cause as little disruption as possible.
- A proposal to build more formal gateway reviews into all of our projects. This will be at major milestones, and will give SSB the opportunity to consider strategic priorities at key points, and contribute to the consideration of project options.
- A proposal to look at providing a mobile print service to allow students and staff to print from all of their mobile devices. The first stage of this will be to assess demand.
- A proposal to implement a mobile app for our VLE.
- A revised service catalogue - our first major review has taken place.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Meetings, meetings....
Today I was in back to back meetings for almost 7 hours - tiring, but all of the meetings were good, so it could have been worse! First off was Service Strategy Board - we look at a monthly report from every Service Manager, including reports from our Service Advisory Groups which have just started meeting. So far we've had meetings of the Teaching and Learning Group, and Research and Innovation. We also look at progress of all of our projects, and discuss proposals for new ones. Main items of discussion today included how we take forward our mobile strategy, and particularly how we continue to develop our mobile app, CampusM. It's important that we do to stay ahead of the game, and we're looking at adding functionality to it. We also talked about desktop video conferencing and the different packages people are using, and whether we should standardise on one centrally supported one. New projects approved included implementing a text messaging service for students and staff for incidents, and implementing HEAR - the Higher Education Achievement Report. I'm pleased that we're part of a consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University to have been awarded funding under the HEFCE/JISC Cloud and Services for Education programme to develop the secure document service for the HEAR project. We also looking at how we were approaching Business Process Review, and I'm hoping that we will soon be implementing LEAN, and the tow pilot processes we will be looking at are Programme Regulations Maintenance and Computer Account Registration.
Next up was the Section heads meeting - the Exec join them for every other meeting - and on the agenda today was a discussion on Investors in People. We already have the standard, and we're being reassessed later this year, so need to make sure that all of the good practice is still embedded. We also talked about the scenario planning the Exec did on our last awayday. In a nutshell, we looked at trends and drivers that will shape the Higher Education Sector, the university and the department over the next 5 to 7 years. Then we imagined what the future might look like if you push these to extremes and produced a number of different "worlds". The most important bit is then looking at how we might have to change to deal with these scenarios. Its a strategic planning tool to produce flexible, long term plans. JISC have produced a good toolkit for it here. It's something we'll be taking forward over the summer with the senior managers in the department.
This was quickly followed by a Business Continuity Meeting where we were looking at plans and policies for incidents which involved possible occupation of University buildings. Final meeting was Senate, where a new Learning and Teaching Strategy was approved. Lots of innovative ideas, and plans for some changes in the way the University teaches.
There was also a very good presentation at Senate of some of the highlights of the year, which I'll try and summarise tomorrow.
Next up was the Section heads meeting - the Exec join them for every other meeting - and on the agenda today was a discussion on Investors in People. We already have the standard, and we're being reassessed later this year, so need to make sure that all of the good practice is still embedded. We also talked about the scenario planning the Exec did on our last awayday. In a nutshell, we looked at trends and drivers that will shape the Higher Education Sector, the university and the department over the next 5 to 7 years. Then we imagined what the future might look like if you push these to extremes and produced a number of different "worlds". The most important bit is then looking at how we might have to change to deal with these scenarios. Its a strategic planning tool to produce flexible, long term plans. JISC have produced a good toolkit for it here. It's something we'll be taking forward over the summer with the senior managers in the department.
This was quickly followed by a Business Continuity Meeting where we were looking at plans and policies for incidents which involved possible occupation of University buildings. Final meeting was Senate, where a new Learning and Teaching Strategy was approved. Lots of innovative ideas, and plans for some changes in the way the University teaches.
There was also a very good presentation at Senate of some of the highlights of the year, which I'll try and summarise tomorrow.
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Business Continuity and Service Strategy
Yesterday had back to back meetings from 9 to 5, with a sandwich grabbed at my desk at lunchtime. Explains my very grubby keyboard and sticky iPad screen!
Started off with the Business Continuity Operations group which I chair, and we had a full agenda. Incidents that we've had over the past few months have generated a number of actions which are being worked through, as well as the various simulated exercises. Today we discussed the priorities for clearing snow across the campus. Pretty difficult to concentrate on that when the sun is shining! We're doing a lot of work on communications, for example looking at how we use SMS messaging to communicate between the Incident Management Team and with the wider body of staff and students. There's also a lot of debate about emergency contact details - how they're collected, stored, accessed and kept up to date. Pretty simple you might think, but it always seems to be an issue. So we're carrying out a process review to determine what we need to change. Lots of stuff going on looking at reciprocal arrangements with other bodies including the local hospitals, work on how we monitor alarms for fire, intruders, sensitive equipment and processes, and liasion with local emergency planning teams. My favourite part of the agenda is where we share details of incidents and near misses - which can be many and varied!
A big piece of work is the review of our Incident Plan, which is very thorough and is coming up with some major changes. As someone who's been an incident manager in the past although I'm not on the group, I do get a briefing on progress. Today looking at the different roles we've identified - from Duty Manager, to Incident Manager and Gold Liaison Officer. I've always wanted to be part of something called Gold Command..... This is going to be one of those documents that you hope we never need, but we will, especially if the last year is anything to go by, and there'll be a big training exercise to be undertaken, as it's important that everyone understands exactly what there role is. During an incident you rarely have time to consult the manual!
The afternoon was taken up with our Service Strategy Board which is proving very useful for airing issues around projects and service changes, and for catching up on what's going on across the department. Today we discussed whether our DEV and QA systems should be subject to the same level of control that our production services are (in service management terms, change management etc), how we handle changes to our managed service, how we handle password resets and whether we should take part in World IPv6 day. I suggested we should declare it a bank holiday and have a street party, but that wasn't what was meant....
Some decisions taken about our Google implementation including which apps will be turned on and looking at giving students accounts for life. We catch up on progress on all projects - some going well, and some slower than I would like, but there are risks to be managed which might be mitigated by delaying implementation if it means more testing can be done.
A very positive final item was our Innovations Space - a space in our collaboration system where people can discuss and suggest innovative projects, and those that look promising are given the go ahead for some investigative work. Lots of lively discussion happening in the space, and two proposals given the go ahead today for some work to see if they're feasible.
Started off with the Business Continuity Operations group which I chair, and we had a full agenda. Incidents that we've had over the past few months have generated a number of actions which are being worked through, as well as the various simulated exercises. Today we discussed the priorities for clearing snow across the campus. Pretty difficult to concentrate on that when the sun is shining! We're doing a lot of work on communications, for example looking at how we use SMS messaging to communicate between the Incident Management Team and with the wider body of staff and students. There's also a lot of debate about emergency contact details - how they're collected, stored, accessed and kept up to date. Pretty simple you might think, but it always seems to be an issue. So we're carrying out a process review to determine what we need to change. Lots of stuff going on looking at reciprocal arrangements with other bodies including the local hospitals, work on how we monitor alarms for fire, intruders, sensitive equipment and processes, and liasion with local emergency planning teams. My favourite part of the agenda is where we share details of incidents and near misses - which can be many and varied!
A big piece of work is the review of our Incident Plan, which is very thorough and is coming up with some major changes. As someone who's been an incident manager in the past although I'm not on the group, I do get a briefing on progress. Today looking at the different roles we've identified - from Duty Manager, to Incident Manager and Gold Liaison Officer. I've always wanted to be part of something called Gold Command..... This is going to be one of those documents that you hope we never need, but we will, especially if the last year is anything to go by, and there'll be a big training exercise to be undertaken, as it's important that everyone understands exactly what there role is. During an incident you rarely have time to consult the manual!
The afternoon was taken up with our Service Strategy Board which is proving very useful for airing issues around projects and service changes, and for catching up on what's going on across the department. Today we discussed whether our DEV and QA systems should be subject to the same level of control that our production services are (in service management terms, change management etc), how we handle changes to our managed service, how we handle password resets and whether we should take part in World IPv6 day. I suggested we should declare it a bank holiday and have a street party, but that wasn't what was meant....
Some decisions taken about our Google implementation including which apps will be turned on and looking at giving students accounts for life. We catch up on progress on all projects - some going well, and some slower than I would like, but there are risks to be managed which might be mitigated by delaying implementation if it means more testing can be done.
A very positive final item was our Innovations Space - a space in our collaboration system where people can discuss and suggest innovative projects, and those that look promising are given the go ahead for some investigative work. Lots of lively discussion happening in the space, and two proposals given the go ahead today for some work to see if they're feasible.
Friday, 4 February 2011
Upgrading SAP
Lots of projects on the go at the moment. One of them is upgrading our Finance/HR/Payroll systems - SAP. This project is a very much 'a CiCS provides the foundations for others' project so there is a lot of initial pressure on us to deliver the technology upfront. It has been a real collaborative effort, calling on colleagues in different areas of CiCS in order to meet the goals.
There's two main phases - a technical upgrade and a functional upgrade. Currently the technology used by SAP does not lend itself to easy customisation, whereas the upgraded technology is far more flexible and accommodating. Also, the current SAP infrastructure consists of 13 physical servers and we plan to migrate all the SAP applications onto a new cluster of virtual servers - so far the team have set up 25 virtual servers. There's lots of benefits to this - easier maintenance, better performance, increased resilience and disaster recovery, its easier to maintain, and it reduces our carbon footprint therefore helping us achieve our carbon reduction targets.
Because the responsibilities for SAP are spread across different departments (us, Finance and HR ) one of the key issues is communication. We're making extensive use of our collaboration environment uSpace to address this issue, and the project manager is posting documents, logs and a blog to help keep people informed of progress.
The project has also had to quickly adapt to changes in circumstances, so that if a resource is going to be unavailable in a particular area, then the project has had to re-prioritise to accommodate this, and this can lead to extremely tight deadlines. Our SAP support consultant spent a day evaluating one stage of the project and concluded that we had an extremely aggressive timescale and that even with their knowledge and experience they would find it difficult to meet and suggested an extra 4-6 weeks would be a more realistic timescale. But - the deadline was met through sheer hard work and determination by all involved, so well done - especially the BASIS team, who I know worked through the Christmas break to get there.
As with any upgrade project, the work has had to be fitted in around the day-to-day running of the systems, which currently include applying and testing the legislative legal patches in time for the end of the tax year. So, thanks to everyone for the work so far - the BASIS team, the developers, the Unix team, the storage team, and the project manager, who I'm told still looks a little shell shocked by the whole thing....
There's two main phases - a technical upgrade and a functional upgrade. Currently the technology used by SAP does not lend itself to easy customisation, whereas the upgraded technology is far more flexible and accommodating. Also, the current SAP infrastructure consists of 13 physical servers and we plan to migrate all the SAP applications onto a new cluster of virtual servers - so far the team have set up 25 virtual servers. There's lots of benefits to this - easier maintenance, better performance, increased resilience and disaster recovery, its easier to maintain, and it reduces our carbon footprint therefore helping us achieve our carbon reduction targets.
Because the responsibilities for SAP are spread across different departments (us, Finance and HR ) one of the key issues is communication. We're making extensive use of our collaboration environment uSpace to address this issue, and the project manager is posting documents, logs and a blog to help keep people informed of progress.
The project has also had to quickly adapt to changes in circumstances, so that if a resource is going to be unavailable in a particular area, then the project has had to re-prioritise to accommodate this, and this can lead to extremely tight deadlines. Our SAP support consultant spent a day evaluating one stage of the project and concluded that we had an extremely aggressive timescale and that even with their knowledge and experience they would find it difficult to meet and suggested an extra 4-6 weeks would be a more realistic timescale. But - the deadline was met through sheer hard work and determination by all involved, so well done - especially the BASIS team, who I know worked through the Christmas break to get there.
As with any upgrade project, the work has had to be fitted in around the day-to-day running of the systems, which currently include applying and testing the legislative legal patches in time for the end of the tax year. So, thanks to everyone for the work so far - the BASIS team, the developers, the Unix team, the storage team, and the project manager, who I'm told still looks a little shell shocked by the whole thing....
Friday, 21 January 2011
Realising benefits and costing services
One of the external projects I'm involved in is the production of a best practice guide funded by HeFCE, which began as a guide to project and programme management, but is now concentrating much more on outcomes rather than management. So, it will be concentrating on how you can realise strategic change and benefits. It arose out of a perceived need for such a toolkit by estates directors and capital projects, but has now been expanded to cover other areas of Universities including IT. On Wednesday I spent the day at the Steering Group meeting where we looked a the different stages of realising change and benefits -the vision and strategic business case; the operational business case; implementation; benefits delivery - and what tools you might need. A very interesting group, and I think the guide will be extremely useful when finished. In toolkit form it will contain information and templates which people can adapt and use to suit their own requirements. As funding becomes more restricted, we'll have to be more rigorous in what big projects we do, and make sure we get the maximum benefits from them.
Yesterday we had our first meeting to kick off a change in the way we look at budgets and expenditure. We want to get much better information on how much our services cost. I could easily find out how much we spend on hardware, software, paper, etc etc, but do we know how much the web service costs? or filestore? or the wireless network? or the payroll system? And do we know how much of our expenditure goes on supporting teaching and learning? Or research? The answer is no - with some qualifications of course. We have done some preliminary work on this, but are now moving into much more detailed work. This should help inform some of our decision making and resource allocation. How do we know what we might have to stop doing if resources are limited if we don't know how much things cost? We've just outsourced email, but we don't know how much we've saved, because we don't know what it was costing us to start with. Hopefully we'll get some useful information out of it.
Yesterday we had our first meeting to kick off a change in the way we look at budgets and expenditure. We want to get much better information on how much our services cost. I could easily find out how much we spend on hardware, software, paper, etc etc, but do we know how much the web service costs? or filestore? or the wireless network? or the payroll system? And do we know how much of our expenditure goes on supporting teaching and learning? Or research? The answer is no - with some qualifications of course. We have done some preliminary work on this, but are now moving into much more detailed work. This should help inform some of our decision making and resource allocation. How do we know what we might have to stop doing if resources are limited if we don't know how much things cost? We've just outsourced email, but we don't know how much we've saved, because we don't know what it was costing us to start with. Hopefully we'll get some useful information out of it.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
User Group and a rogue unix command
It was our User Group this morning - always well attended and a chance to bring our customers up to date with developments and get some feedback. Began with a projects update:
Other things we talked about were recent incidents and performance problems, and the complexity of systems, processes, configuration and data which underlies everything we do. Trying to get a handle of not just the systems, but the business processes, to simplify them is our next big thing.
I then gave a version of my "Challenges Facing an IT Director" presentation, which I've blogged about before, leading into an explanation of our new governance process, based on service management. Illustrated beautifully by this simple diagram:
Finally we had a very good presentation on our upgraded Content Management System which is about to go live. This is something we've been justifiably criticised for over the past couple of years as the version of the system we've been running is not brilliant, but the upgraded one is much better!
Then a discussion with our internal auditors about our next audit - on Freedom of Information - more on that as it happens!
At the end of this afternoon, a couple of things that make me love working in CiCS. Someone (who shall remain nameless unless outed in the comments), made a little mistake with a unix command and deleted something he shouldn't have. The command was " rm -R * " which might mean something to unix people :-). Anyway, he was promptly visited by our Unix group leader who beat him over the head repeatedly with a plastic hammer and then pinned a P45 to his desk. Perhaps not a mistake he'll make again!
And the second thing was someone introducing me to Flipboard for the iPad. It's brilliant! So elegant, and such a different way to look at social media.
- MOLE2 (our new VLE ) is going well and live in 2 pilot departments, being rolled out to rest of University over next year or so.
- Google - we've made the decision now in principle to implement Google apps for staff, moving mail at Christmas and calendar and other apps soon after
- Upgrade to our student system - technical upgrade completed and gone well, look and feel upgrade now in progress.
- New portal (to be based on Liferay) progressing well
Other things we talked about were recent incidents and performance problems, and the complexity of systems, processes, configuration and data which underlies everything we do. Trying to get a handle of not just the systems, but the business processes, to simplify them is our next big thing.
I then gave a version of my "Challenges Facing an IT Director" presentation, which I've blogged about before, leading into an explanation of our new governance process, based on service management. Illustrated beautifully by this simple diagram:
Finally we had a very good presentation on our upgraded Content Management System which is about to go live. This is something we've been justifiably criticised for over the past couple of years as the version of the system we've been running is not brilliant, but the upgraded one is much better!
Then a discussion with our internal auditors about our next audit - on Freedom of Information - more on that as it happens!
At the end of this afternoon, a couple of things that make me love working in CiCS. Someone (who shall remain nameless unless outed in the comments), made a little mistake with a unix command and deleted something he shouldn't have. The command was " rm -R * " which might mean something to unix people :-). Anyway, he was promptly visited by our Unix group leader who beat him over the head repeatedly with a plastic hammer and then pinned a P45 to his desk. Perhaps not a mistake he'll make again!
And the second thing was someone introducing me to Flipboard for the iPad. It's brilliant! So elegant, and such a different way to look at social media.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Benefits and wireless
Yesterday I spent some of the day at the University of Wolverhampton Telford campus. I've been invited to be a member of a Steering Group to produce a Guide on Programme Management, funded as part of the HEFCE Leadership and Management Fund. The intention is not to produce a guide telling people how to run projects, but to focus on how to chose projects as part of a programme to achieve University objectives, and to focus particularly on benefits delivery and realisation. The project originated from a study on how HECFE capital money had been used and managed, and whether benefits had been actually realised, or even measured. Consequently the steering group is made up mainly of Estates Directors, but I am on to represent JISC and the IT sector, and we are hoping to involve people from Finance, Planning, and Faculties.
The intention is to produce a toolkit which will be capable of being used in any institution, across all disciplines. Yesterday we looked at the structure of the guide, and the sorts of things we expect to see in it. The link between strategy, programmes and projects, all of which should be benefits led is important. We should also give guidance on defining benefits, and how they might be measured, recognising that they are not always financial and may seem to be intangible. There'll also be case studies, as well as vignettes and examples.
Looks like being an interesting project.
One of the thing I've forgotten to say, is that for the last few weeks I've not been carrying my laptop to meetings or conferences, instead slipping my iPad in my handbag. So far it's worked well - the battery life is great, and with the discovery of iAnnotate I can treat digital papers just like paper, scribbling on them, highlighting stuff etc. The only downside was last week in London where my hotel room had internet access, but it was only wired, not wireless. Not much good for an iPad, but luckily there was a good 3G signal. The rise of wireless only devices has made us think about whether we should revise our policy of wired only access in the rooms of our halls of residences. There's wireless in the communal areas, but not much good for an iPodTouch, or iPad, or some netbooks. And, even with a laptop, you don't want to be tied to using it at a desk, but I like to sit in bed and watch iPlayer!
The intention is to produce a toolkit which will be capable of being used in any institution, across all disciplines. Yesterday we looked at the structure of the guide, and the sorts of things we expect to see in it. The link between strategy, programmes and projects, all of which should be benefits led is important. We should also give guidance on defining benefits, and how they might be measured, recognising that they are not always financial and may seem to be intangible. There'll also be case studies, as well as vignettes and examples.
Looks like being an interesting project.
One of the thing I've forgotten to say, is that for the last few weeks I've not been carrying my laptop to meetings or conferences, instead slipping my iPad in my handbag. So far it's worked well - the battery life is great, and with the discovery of iAnnotate I can treat digital papers just like paper, scribbling on them, highlighting stuff etc. The only downside was last week in London where my hotel room had internet access, but it was only wired, not wireless. Not much good for an iPad, but luckily there was a good 3G signal. The rise of wireless only devices has made us think about whether we should revise our policy of wired only access in the rooms of our halls of residences. There's wireless in the communal areas, but not much good for an iPodTouch, or iPad, or some netbooks. And, even with a laptop, you don't want to be tied to using it at a desk, but I like to sit in bed and watch iPlayer!
Friday, 17 September 2010
Social Network Analysis
One of the themes to come out of many of the presentations and discussions was that successful collaboration projects recognise that 80% of the effort should be put into the people issues. The technology is only part of the story. One way of getting a perspective of what issues might exist is to do a social network analysis. Look at current relationships and connections between people, identifying nodes and information flows. If you look at how work gets done you can identify influential people, groups who work together, and loners who don't communicate. It can then be interesting to compare with the organisational structure. In the above hypothetical example there's an individual easily identified who seems key, but would not be easily identifiable from the organisational chart. Without him, the "blue" team would be totally disconnected from the rest of the group. The Head of the Dept (red) is also fairly disconnected.
So, could doing such an analysis on our own departments/teams tell us anything we didn't know? Could we use it to better understand how we work, and where there might be issues? The presentation included some examples of social network analyses of projects and their interaction with stakeholders, which did illustrate how integrated the members of the network are, how well information is being shared across the network and how influential certain project participants are. It seemed to provide a more useful depiction than a project organisation structure diagram since it can identify critical relationships in projects.
Definitely food for thought.
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Lessons learned
Programme Board yesterday, and possibly the last one, as we move to our new service management structure and a Service Strategy Board. Had our normal look at progress of projects and any resource issues or problems identified by the project managers, and then had a few project closures and reviews to consider. Each project has to produce a closure document, with the normal stuff about what has been delivered, what outstanding tasks there are and who has responsibility for delivering them, benefits, and whether the aims and objectives were achieved. Then a few months later the Programme and Project Unit carries out a lessons learned review by collecting information from the project team, the project manager, customer, sponsor etc.
This is a very useful exercise and all recommendations are fed into our project management process to continually improve what we do. Yesterday we looked at the Media Hosting Project and eRecruitment.
Within the Media Hosting project, much of it went well, but one issue which arose was that we were faced with a rapidly changing technology market and changes to the project scope. We looked at a number of products and services, but none met all of the identified requirements and it soon became apparent that we were looking for a product which didn't exist! We therefore had to decide whether to put the project on hold and wait for the market to mature, or split the project into separate projects for audio and video streams. The project was paused for a while, but in the end we decided to implement a video only solution for now. It was suggested with hindsight that we should have done a review of the market place first to see what was available before defining user requirements, but this would have constrained users to what was available, and we know that one supplier has built our requirements into their roadmap to we should get the additional features we need in the next release (or the one after that....)
eRecruitment (the staff recruitment module of SAP) also went very well, with cross departmental teams working successfully together, and good communication channels established. Lessons learned from this much bigger project included the need to have good commitment - from all of the teams involved, the sponsor, the project board, engaged users etc. Ownership of the project should be primarily with the business side, not the technical, and the focus on new ways of doing things, not the system itself. The people who are going to run and support the system need to involved very early on, and good training and comms are essential. All stuff we know already, but reinforced by thei review.
Thanks to everyone involved in all of the projects which have closed recently - some great work done.
This is a very useful exercise and all recommendations are fed into our project management process to continually improve what we do. Yesterday we looked at the Media Hosting Project and eRecruitment.
Within the Media Hosting project, much of it went well, but one issue which arose was that we were faced with a rapidly changing technology market and changes to the project scope. We looked at a number of products and services, but none met all of the identified requirements and it soon became apparent that we were looking for a product which didn't exist! We therefore had to decide whether to put the project on hold and wait for the market to mature, or split the project into separate projects for audio and video streams. The project was paused for a while, but in the end we decided to implement a video only solution for now. It was suggested with hindsight that we should have done a review of the market place first to see what was available before defining user requirements, but this would have constrained users to what was available, and we know that one supplier has built our requirements into their roadmap to we should get the additional features we need in the next release (or the one after that....)
eRecruitment (the staff recruitment module of SAP) also went very well, with cross departmental teams working successfully together, and good communication channels established. Lessons learned from this much bigger project included the need to have good commitment - from all of the teams involved, the sponsor, the project board, engaged users etc. Ownership of the project should be primarily with the business side, not the technical, and the focus on new ways of doing things, not the system itself. The people who are going to run and support the system need to involved very early on, and good training and comms are essential. All stuff we know already, but reinforced by thei review.
Thanks to everyone involved in all of the projects which have closed recently - some great work done.
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Review of achievements in 2009
After all the depressing news about the Digital Economy Bill, something a bit more cheerful! Last week I posted that we'd completed our planning statement, and as part of that we'd done a review of achievements over the past year. Thought it might be interesting to share it a bit more widely - it's very short as we had to keep it to less than a page of bullet points, but I hope gives a flavour of the sorts of activities we've been involved in. Will post list of current objectives/projects soon. Achievements listed under our seven service area headings.
Learning and Teaching
Learning and Teaching
Continued to implement innovative technologies to provide the best learning experience for students.
Implemented lecture capture tool to allow streaming of lectures over the internet. Reviewed underlying system delivering MOLE (on-line learning environment).
Improved speed of the managed desktop. Replaced 120 PCS in teaching rooms.
Recruited a Teaching Space Manager and established a programme to pilot timetabling at Faculty level to increase efficiency in space utilisation.
Research
Research support strategy written.
Improved collaboration facilitated by implementation of uSpace.
Web portals for submission of jobs to HPC implemented.
Introduced Research Publications database as part of REF.
Collaboration and Communication
Launched uSpace - a collaborative environment for students, all staff and external contacts - which allows co-authoring of documents, blogging, and discussions.
Launched a new email service for students based on Google technologies.
Developed and launched a mobile application for students, CampusM, giving access to location data, library information etc on mobile phones.
Help & Support
Improved access to our help and support systems by introducing helpdesk self-service, remote support, service status page and twitter notifications.
Improved the quality of the customer experience by improving communication, decision making and processes across the whole department through the introduction of key elements of Service Management including problem, incident and change management.
Infrastructure
Major services moved to clusters of computers in two data centres,
University connected to JANET by two independent links
Consolidation of servers and storage using virtualisation techniques, increasing the resilience of services while reducing carbon footprint, space usage and running costs.
Corporate Information
Improved access to management information through the implementation of MIView - a management information dashboard for senior decision makers.
Completed the SAP implementation programme and continued to improve services through the implementation of eRecruitment - streamlining the application and the recruitment process.
Responded to changes required by the Points Based Immigration Scheme.
Business Activity
Continued to promote good project management practice in the department and University through help, advice and considerable resources on project support web site.
Established the University Print Management Team and completed an EU Tender for outsourced print to improve the environmental impact of printing within the University. Installed the latest high volume Mono and Colour Digital Printing equipment, improving quality and reducing cost.
Completed significant refurbishments to Drama Studio including introduction of video relay system.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
The Arts Tower reappears
Programme Board earlier this week, with only one new Project Definition to approve - for a Student Attendance Monitoring system. This is mainly to fulfil the legislative requirements around the new Points Based Immigration system introduced by the UK Border Agency aimed at International students, but will also be used to monitor all students to enable us to pick up any problems and identify where support might be needed.
We also had our regular item of looking at progress on all projects, with good progress on a number of them including the VLE review, our portal review and our media hosting project.
Yesterday I had a never ending series of meetings, from 0830 to 1730 with even my 30 minute lunch break taken up with having a photo taken of the Exec for the Annual Report. I'm pleased to report that our intrepid photographer (who perhaps wishes to remain nameless) managed to get one decent one of the four of us with all of us with our eyes open and looking vaguely happy!
One of the meetings yesterday was the Professional Service Executive Directors with the Registrar looking at progress on a number of workstreams. These included work on Corporate Communications and Planning and Budget setting. One of the largest and most complex workstreams is on our Estates Strategy as we try to reduce our running costs and carbon footprint. This will
involve some moves of departments, including the Professional Services, as one of our major capital projects comes to fruition. The Arts Tower is a 19 storey grade 2* listed building which opened in 1965 and has recently been undergoing a major refurbishment. It's spent the last few months completely covered by wrapping, and on cloudy days has disappeared from the landscape. It is just starting to reappear, and the top floor
is already visible as the wrapping and scaffolding comes down. - it will take 26 weeks for the scaffolding to be struck completely.
Plans for the re-occupation of the building are currently been drawn up, and will allow some consolidation of services. It will be an exciting time. It is popularly believed, although there is no documentary evidence, that the Arts Tower is based on the the Seagram Building in New York. It certainly looks similar to me!
We also had our regular item of looking at progress on all projects, with good progress on a number of them including the VLE review, our portal review and our media hosting project.
Yesterday I had a never ending series of meetings, from 0830 to 1730 with even my 30 minute lunch break taken up with having a photo taken of the Exec for the Annual Report. I'm pleased to report that our intrepid photographer (who perhaps wishes to remain nameless) managed to get one decent one of the four of us with all of us with our eyes open and looking vaguely happy!
One of the meetings yesterday was the Professional Service Executive Directors with the Registrar looking at progress on a number of workstreams. These included work on Corporate Communications and Planning and Budget setting. One of the largest and most complex workstreams is on our Estates Strategy as we try to reduce our running costs and carbon footprint. This will
involve some moves of departments, including the Professional Services, as one of our major capital projects comes to fruition. The Arts Tower is a 19 storey grade 2* listed building which opened in 1965 and has recently been undergoing a major refurbishment. It's spent the last few months completely covered by wrapping, and on cloudy days has disappeared from the landscape. It is just starting to reappear, and the top floor
is already visible as the wrapping and scaffolding comes down. - it will take 26 weeks for the scaffolding to be struck completely.Plans for the re-occupation of the building are currently been drawn up, and will allow some consolidation of services. It will be an exciting time. It is popularly believed, although there is no documentary evidence, that the Arts Tower is based on the the Seagram Building in New York. It certainly looks similar to me!
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Common Timetabling
Very short Programme Board this week as no project reports due to Christmas break but we did approve two new projects - one s a continuation of an existing one. Currently we're reviewing our VLE, and once a decision is taken on how to proceed we will have quite a big implementation task, so that's been set up as a new project. The other has been under discussion for some time, but we're finally getting on with it, and this is to implement a common approach to timetabling.
Timetabling is currently based at a departmental level and there is consequently considerable duplication of effort as timetables are created locally. Requests are then made for room bookings centrally, and then often timetablers will transpose the allocated room information back into local systems.
The software we use has the capacity to capture relevant information such as staffing constraints and to automatically produce a scheduled, roomed timetable. We can then produce clash free personal student timetables which can be delivered to students though the portal and Google calendar, and though our mobile application, campusM. This should also save a considerable amount of staff time by reducing duplication of effort, and develop better timetabling expertise at Faculty level. The timetable will be produced earlier allowing for better planning, and we should also be able to utilise our existing rooms better. We intend to have draft timetables produced in this way for our pilot Faculties by this summer.
Another meeting on a similar topic - discussion about the Drama Studio and how we can accommodate everyone who wants to use it, including academic use for our Drama degree which is expanding, the Student Theatre society, other academic departments and external amateur dramatic groups. We have a user group coming up next week where a lot of these issues will be discussed.
Timetabling is currently based at a departmental level and there is consequently considerable duplication of effort as timetables are created locally. Requests are then made for room bookings centrally, and then often timetablers will transpose the allocated room information back into local systems.
The software we use has the capacity to capture relevant information such as staffing constraints and to automatically produce a scheduled, roomed timetable. We can then produce clash free personal student timetables which can be delivered to students though the portal and Google calendar, and though our mobile application, campusM. This should also save a considerable amount of staff time by reducing duplication of effort, and develop better timetabling expertise at Faculty level. The timetable will be produced earlier allowing for better planning, and we should also be able to utilise our existing rooms better. We intend to have draft timetables produced in this way for our pilot Faculties by this summer.
Another meeting on a similar topic - discussion about the Drama Studio and how we can accommodate everyone who wants to use it, including academic use for our Drama degree which is expanding, the Student Theatre society, other academic departments and external amateur dramatic groups. We have a user group coming up next week where a lot of these issues will be discussed.
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Programmes and Projects
Lots of meetings yesterday - is there such a thing as a pre-Christmas meeting rush? First was with the Faculty of Arts and was one of our strategic liaison meetings. Discussion was around our main service areas - support for learning and teaching, research and communication and collaboration. We identified some priorities for further work and discussion, including the area of space utilisation and timetabling. They offer many degree programmes, with a high number of dual degrees, and finding enough space and with the right equipment is an issue for them. Currently we have a timetabler in each department, and the rather sophisticated software we have is used mainly as a room allocation system. At our Programme Board meeting yesterday we agreed to establish a new project to look at moving to a more central timetabling system, using more of the software's functionality to improve the utilisation of our estate. This links in with a number of University initiatives, including the carbon reduction one.
Also at the Programme Board we approved another new project, to review our portal. We've had a staff and student portal for some years as part of our strategy to make everything available over the web, and the time has come to review it. Lots of preparatory work already done, so now we need to make a decision on the way forward.
Following our Departmental Programme Board we had a meeting of the University Collaboration Improvement Programme Board where we had a very interesting discussion on whether Universities encouraged and rewarded collaboration, and how important it is to break down silo mentality. The latter is particularly important in times of financial difficulty - it's very easy to become very protectionist, but that won't get us anywhere - except into more difficulty.
Also at the Programme Board we approved another new project, to review our portal. We've had a staff and student portal for some years as part of our strategy to make everything available over the web, and the time has come to review it. Lots of preparatory work already done, so now we need to make a decision on the way forward.
Following our Departmental Programme Board we had a meeting of the University Collaboration Improvement Programme Board where we had a very interesting discussion on whether Universities encouraged and rewarded collaboration, and how important it is to break down silo mentality. The latter is particularly important in times of financial difficulty - it's very easy to become very protectionist, but that won't get us anywhere - except into more difficulty.
Monday, 16 November 2009
Procurement and programmes
Programme Board meeting today - looking at progress on a number of important projects. Most going well (especially eRecruitment as I mentioned the other week), and some slower than we'd hoped. Several big ones on the go that if they come to fruition within our agreed timescales will mean we have a new portal, a new VLE and a new managed desktop all going live over next summer. Will require some careful resource management. Our replacement desktop is the one I have the most concerns about - it has been a priority for some time but we can't seem to find an ideal solution. How do we deliver over 250 applications of very different types (some standard like office, some requiring a great deal of graphics processing like CAD, some a great deal of processing power) to our 1500 student open access computers, all of the lecture theatres and to personal devices such as laptops wherever they happen to be. Thin client/web-based would seem to be the answer but this doesn't work for every application (especially the large ones) and requires a fairly significant investment in the infrastructure. Hopefully we'll have a solution soon - answers on a postcard please.
Also had a meeting with colleagues from our Procurement Office to discuss matters specific to IT procurement. Included many of the old chestnuts such as when is an upgrade not an upgrade, and how long does a tender last, as well as some new issues. Services that cost nothing, such as our recent Google outsourcing, have thrown up all sorts of issues for procurement departments. How do you evauate open source software against commercial software was another area for discussion. Very productive and informative meeting, but I do get very despondent when a we're told that situation we have in place with suppliers which works really well and provides best value to the University is no longer possible because of a change in European law. Off to find out what other IT departments are doing about it. Surely someone will have found a way round it, oops, sorry, a different interpretation of it.
Also had a meeting with colleagues from our Procurement Office to discuss matters specific to IT procurement. Included many of the old chestnuts such as when is an upgrade not an upgrade, and how long does a tender last, as well as some new issues. Services that cost nothing, such as our recent Google outsourcing, have thrown up all sorts of issues for procurement departments. How do you evauate open source software against commercial software was another area for discussion. Very productive and informative meeting, but I do get very despondent when a we're told that situation we have in place with suppliers which works really well and provides best value to the University is no longer possible because of a change in European law. Off to find out what other IT departments are doing about it. Surely someone will have found a way round it, oops, sorry, a different interpretation of it.
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