Space, SSB and George

Early start yesterday for a UEB/HoDS meeting (I should include a glossary shouldn't I - University Executive Board, Heads of Departments). One of the main discussion items was Space. I have to resist the temptation to always add The Final Frontier.  Specifically teaching space. Have we got enough, do we need to use it better?
Lots of data provided, including the different patterns of teaching (Monday mornings and Friday afternoons aren't popular), and the number of rooms booked which aren't used.  Discussions centred around how we can change our systems to improve efficiency of use, and what cultures need to change. Lots of very constructive discussion ranging from central timetabling to extending the teaching day. Lots more discussion to come as we cannot keep building more space.

Also yesterday we had a Business Continuity Steering Group where we  had a demo of our new Incident Contacts system, and a debrief of the incident simulation of a couple of weeks ago. Some headlines coming out of it include the need for "sub plans" to have in case of an incident - how do we evacuate a building safely without using fire alarms for example, or how do we cancel and rearrange exams. 

Then yesterday afternoon was our Service Strategy Board. As usual, a full meeting. In fact all meetings yesterday were full, not one less than two hours. But, all useful and interesting. SSB had a presentation on our Incident Procedure which has been revamped. Some of the key points to come out of the discussion included:

• Front line support are a vital part of the process. We need to integrate the helpdesk and service catalogue, and complete our  Service Level Agreements (SLA's).
• We discussed target resolution time for typical low-medium-high level problems which will be in the SLAs
• We're introducing more regular reporting on incidents and the following reviews
• One of the major areas of discussion was around out of hours incidents which are often the hardest to manage. Our new  incident contact database will help but we do have an issue with customer expectations of  24/7 suppor.
• Major incidents will continue to be  handled by a team, with an identified incident co-ordinator, working with the University incident management plan as appropriate. 
• We also noted that the Service Manager for the area is key to strategic decisions and needs to be involved in all incident teams.

A good discussion and the revised plan will now be subject to further consultation before being finalised in the New Year when we'll start a period of training and awareness raising. 

Lots of other good stuff in the Service Managers highlight reports and project progress documents. I was pleased to note the continuing success of the creative media suite in the IC, and a recent session for 40 students in the production of creative media was fully booked within hours. You can read about in the IC blog here.
We looked at several new project proposals and approved one of them - which can be summarised as Getting out of uSpace  (uSpace is our collaboration software which we hope to be out of by end of next year).  Others will be subject to further discussion and prioritisation.

And the most exciting thing to happen yesterday - I adopted a new cat. George. He's huge and furry. Does he look like a maine coon to anyone?

Workspace design for 2020

Last session today is about designing new office work spaces for the year 2020.

Research by Lilly
Replacing generic cube farm with multiple specialised spaces, has many benefits. Not sure if you can read this, but impressive findings.




Proximity makes the heart grow fonder. Best thing you can do, is put people together, co-location is best, but typically unachievable! Frequency of interpersonal communication drops exponentially as distance increases. Even on Facebook! The more people work together in a physical space, the more effective they are when working apart. Need to balance mobility and proximity.

Some case studies.
Citrix had goals including better support team innovation; more, faster, earlier collaboration; fewer silos.
Created large, glass walled space, transparent. Everything on wheels, no reservations, whiteboards used to separate areas. Kept under review, and constantly improved and made changes.

SEI had a set of values and wanted space to reflect them. Everyone got a desk on wheels, no offices, no personal phones, but team phones. Lined walls with contemporary art to invite creativity and debate.

How do you measure whether this sort of change has been successful? Have to measure, set up things to measure beforehand eg behaviours.

Other studies show that people in high visibility locations have 60% more interactions.
Need to provide oases of informal meeting space. 102% more interactions than in formal meeting rooms

Some best practice guidelines:
Need to design for activities, not roles.
Assume people move several times a day
Establish social conventions (. Eg it's OK to ask someone alone in a room to move for a meeting)
Measure results
Furniture should echo the space's purpose
Thick carpeting for quiet areas, thin for high traffic
Usual natural light, free flowing air and green rooms with living plants
Create zones and randomise in neighbourhoods
Put lockers in high traffic areas
Always have space not reserved
Create different kinds of space, "library" space for quiet working, huddle rooms, stand up meeting spaces.

Smart buildings are important, and it's not just about HVAC. It should know where you are and what you're doing. Also who you are, biometrics for access control and authentication.

Environmental and privacy issues need to be considered. The walls will have eyes and ears. Everything may be recorded. Systems will know your patterns and will be able to automatically schedule travel time.

We need to plan on the new PC area, personal cloud not personal computer. We will all use multiple devices, apps will be everywhere. Smart mobile devices will be pervasive, and there will be WiFi for everything, except maybe power. Don't want to cook people.

Lots of technology changes will affect workspace:
Touch interactive surfaces. Multiple displays per person. 3D gestures and voice controls. Active displays and monitored passive projection surfaces.
Video in meetings, multi point commodity video, eg Hangouts, for team meetings. Holodecks ( I think you have to be a Trekkie to understand this one).

Workspace best practices:
Adjustable dimensions for varied devices
Power at work surface
Controlled lighting to minimise glare on any device
Ergonomic chairs
Minimise noise propagation

Some cool stuff.
Self navigating robotic aides. Autonomous mobile assistants with contextual awareness and are able to adapt to environmental change and recognise individuals. MIT already have prototypes.

Paper consumption per capita in offices peaked in 2002 and has been dropping ever since. Tablets have made it drop even more. Set paper targets. Ban personal printers. Power and noise benefits. But make sure you have an informal oasis to replace the photocopier!

In summary, need to explore cultural, social relationships, behavioural objectives and business goals when designing workspaces.
Plan for the future, 2020 will be here soon.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

New students, space and data

So, the campus is buzzing this week as the new students arrive back. We had staff up at the student residences all weekend, mainly helping them connect to the newly installed wireless network. Many had completed all of the pre-registration information which gave them a computer account, but those who hadn't were able to do that as soon as they arrived.  It was very interesting that many of them who had completed all of their pre-arrival information, and had been given a username and email address, couldn't use them, as they couldn't remember what password they had created!  This was despite making it more obvious that this password was actually important to them once they got to University. Perhaps next year we should just suggest they use their Facebook password :-)

Now it's Fresher's Week, new students are finalising their module choices, picking up their uCards, and finding their way round campus. Helping them to do that is our newly re-branded mobile app, iSheffield, available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and as a web app. It's got some great location features, including finding the nearest free open access PC.

As well as keeping an eye on what's happening with registration, this week so far I've had a couple of catch up meetings, and the inaugural meeting of the the Learning Infrastructure Group. This is a small, focused group, chaired by a PVC, and with the Directors of Student Services and Estates, myself, 2 academic heads of department, a project support officer.  Its remit is to provide a strategic steer to a number of projects which have an impact on teaching space, including the common timetabling project, teaching space refurbishments, and many projects looking at data which utlimately affect the way we handle process such as timetabling.  I'm not sure anyone understood the complex interactions of these projects, until they tried to study the diagram below!

Later today I'm off to London to a Gartner conference on Portals, Content and Collaboration, so will try and blog as many interesting sessions as I can. As usual, this will take the form of live blogs, so most will be in note form.

Bourne again

As part of the Digital Day Out today, some of us were lucky enough to get a tour round Ravensbourne. Previously Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, and before that an art college boasting alumni including David Bowie, it moved from its Chislehurst location to a brand new building in 2010 and rebranded itself Ravensbourne.




It specialises in digital media and design, with a courses spanning fashion, broadcasting, product design, architecture, graphic design, animation, moving image. The building is ideally placed on the digital peninsula, and as you would imagine, is the product of very innovative design with some great features.





The space takes flexibility to its extreme. It's mainly open plan, no academic has an office, there's no owned space, no concept of departmental space. Just functional, flexible spaces.

The prototype lab has everything from textile design, to engineering product design, to 3d printing, to electronic prototyping. All of the students work side by side.








Everything is open and flexible. Sometimes just the pillars have "room numbers" on, and the space is arranged however it's needed.








Lots of lockers around as well for personal possessions. It's incredibly technology rich. Every student has to own a laptop, and there's a bursary system in place for students to purchase MacBooks. Lots of media editing stations, sound studios, broadcasting studios, etc. But sometimes, low tech works just as well, such as the vertical projection screens which can be moved around the flexible teaching areas and are better than fixed plasma screens. Some great social spaces for students as well. And with 80% space occupancy it's very efficient.




I loved it! It even has a funky url - www.rave.ac.uk

Hope to get a group of us from Sheffield on a proper tour soon. Oh, and the views were pretty impressive!





PS Apologies for quality of photos - taken with my old iPhone so not brilliant, but they're a lot better if you click on them

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Visiting Faculties

A couple of visits to Faculties this morning - first was a strategic liaison meeting with Social Sciences. We talked about the key challenges facing us and our plans for the next year. A tension which is apparent in all of our discussions at the moment is that we know the HE sector is facing financial pressures, and we need to plan for cuts, but Faculties can plan to expand, whether its student numbers or research. That's not really an option for us in the Professional Services. In order to protect our support for teaching and learning and research we may have to look at reducing support in other areas - or looking at different ways of sourcing services.

We also discussed a number of new developments, including upgrades to our VLE, uSpace and our CMS - all happening in the next few weeks - discussion focused on the effect they will have on academics in particular and the benefits they will bring. We also covered our common timetabling project, and possible future developments in student assessments. We had a good discussion about support for research, especially in terms of data storage - there's still too many departments storing their own data on departmental servers with the associated security and business continuity risks.

After that we visited Engineering, and covered a number of areas, many to do with infrastructure and space. Space for large groups of IT- enabled teaching is a particular issue, and we're looking at more innovative ways of using space - by using laptops in laboratory space for example. We're investing quite heavily this year in expanding our wireless network to facilitate this. Re-equipping lecture theatres, using lecture capture software and improving access to software from laptops is also high on our agenda to give more flexibility in use of space.

Re-using labs, and getting rid of paper

Liaison Meeting with the Faculty of Science today- lots on the agenda, including big discussion on teaching space. We're trying to make the best use of our estate, and reduce space if we can - we need to reduce our carbon emissions, like all Universities, and reducing space is one way of contributing to it. In order to reduce space, we have to utilise what we have much better, and we were discussing today ways of doing that. Our common timetabling project should help, but we're also looking at other innovative ideas, such as using laboratories as computer rooms when they're not in use for practical classes. Obvous we can't have hard wired PCs in there, but we could have a stack of laptops using the wireless network that could be brought out when needed. Issues to address obviously such as what applications we can deliver to them, can we cope with 75 simultaneous connections to wifi, have we got the staff to maintain them - but nothing insurmountable. Of course students could also use their own laptops, if we could get the applications to them. Hopeful our new desktop project will solve that one...

Another area where we need to improve our carbon footprint is in printing - and we are currently going in to departments carrying out printing audits to see how we can help them print less, and where they do have to print, do it in a more efficient and carbon friendly way. I'm still amazed by how little people consider the cost (£ and C) of printing. The number of meetings I go to and see people clutching folders of single sided papers, carefully printed out by clerical staff I assume, often with colour banners, and presumeably filed when they get back - despite the fact that nearly all papers are held electronically centrally. Or thrown away, often having never even been referred to in the meeting. Hobby horse of mine I'm afraid!

Finally today we had a long look at our budget, and discussed costs, prioritisation and timing of our capital spending. Very difficult to do when you can't get good cost estimates for projects which are not complete, and will be making decisions about possible changes to technologies and infrastructure. Lots of flexibility needed!

Teaching space review

One of the discussions I'm involved in at the moment is a review of our teaching space - have we got enough, is it in the right place, is the right size, is it in good condition and does it have appropriate facilities in? Changes in the way we teach means that we need different sorts of space - for example flexible spaces, break out rooms etc - and we're looking to see how that can be provided. There's also issues of how we timetable the huge number of modules we run and allocate space to them. Lots of work involved!

I've also had a meeting about the University Collaboration Improvement Programme, and in particular how we measure the use of our services. It's important to measure use so that we can track changes as we try and increase the uptake of some of the services we offer. We're especially looking at MUSE (the University portal), myCalendar and myChat at the moment. MUSE is going well, with a large increase of people using it, but we have a lot to do to get the use of myCalendar and myChat up to our desired levels. Measurements of use are by department and we will be making these public on our web site soon, so we can see where departments are making full use of the services and maybe use those as examplars to other departments.

Executive Team move into Ivory Towers

Every Monday we have an Executive Team meeting – myself, Deputy Director John Hawley, and Assistant Directors John McAuley. Dave Speake and Kath Winter. Many things are discussed, decided and argued about (not necessarily in that order), and I’ll try and produce an update after each meeting - if you want more information or to discuss something further, don’t hesitate to comment!

Today we talked about some “Transformational Maps” we’ve been working on. Basically to try and show an “as is” and a “to be” situation - where we are now, and where we want to get to as a department. When these are in a fit state to share, we will, and then hopefully they will be discussed in teams and sections. We are also going to hold some consultation events with all staff to get everyone’s opinions of what the department’s vision should be, and where individual staff can contribute to achieving it.

Staff accommodation is also high on the agenda at the moment, and we want to try and improve the working environment for everyone – the Computer Centre has just had a major refurbishment, and our attention is turning now to the Glossop Road properties. We will be making a series of moves over the next few months, and doing what refurbishment we can afford. User and Data Support will be moving into 344 Glossop Road, allowing Technical Services to be better consolidated in 285-289, with all of the Executive Team on the top 2 floors of 285 – some people have referred to this as the Ivory Towers – others think Fawlty Towers might be more appropriate.

Changes to the way we charge for telephone services - moving towards a line rental and lower charges for calls - were also discussed - proposals will be put to the appropriate bodies soon.

And of course – the most important discussion of all – arrangements for the Christmas party!