Efficiency Exchange and Staff development

A brief update on a couple of sessions from this morning:

Staff development
Session from JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire and Humberside about a new approach to staff development using a roadshow model. Mainly working with FE colleges. Taking technology round the region, focussing on teaching and learning, not the technology. Used the day to use collaborative scenario based activities. So, scenarios published in advance which attendees can work through, or come up with their own.
The kit is getting smaller, using tablets and mobile technology. Also a lot of free software out there. Look at new and emerging technology such as Augmented Reality, often staff don't know what's out there for them to use. Can create eBooks easily on the day.

There's a YouTube video about what they're doing here.


Efficiency Exchange
Really interested in this as I was part of the Diamond group which recommended it be established. It's a web resource for sharing and promoting efficiency, process improvement and sharing initiatives in HR.
The web site is excellent, and our own Process Improvement Unit has contributed to it.
They have a partnership with the Guardian, and there is a section in the Higher Education Network with content sourced directly from the EE.

This is definitely worth subscribing to.



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From IT Silos to IT Alliance

Despite the free beer and cocktails last night, I'm in the 8am session. It's from the University of Minnesota about a training programme they have run for IT leaders. It's a very distributed University with 5 campuses and many research centres spread across the state. They have a highly distributed IT structure, with about about a third of IT staff in a central IT department, a third in colleges and campuses and a third in admin offices.

They wanted to build a community of leaders, and implemented a leadership programme. Took 30 people from across all IT departments for a couple of days a month for 8 months. They used active learning concepts and applied their learning to real issues. They spent a lot of time investing in relationships to build trust across the institution and developing personal networks.

Taught to look at issues through three lenses, strategic, political and cultural. Consider that feedback is a gift. Get rid of defensiveness, and thank people for it.
Develop leadership skills, important to coach staff. Don't solve their problems but get them to a stage where they can solve their own problems.

Programme was a success, and led to real initiatives, including development of a service catalogue, consolidating Helpdesks ( they had 73!), virtualising servers and implementing Google Apps across the whole University.

Trust has been established, and there's a shared commitment to the institutions goals. Formal and informal communities of practice have been established.

Interesting session, and a good example of how disparate groups were brought together. Hopefully our own leadership programme is having the same effect,


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Ch-ch-changes

Lots of meetings again today - this morning a meeting to look at change management. We're on the way to implementing ITIL - in a way that suits us - and are mainly looking at problem, incident, change and test management. Some good processes already in place, and we've looked at the sorts and amounts of changes we make by logging them all for a month. Today we were looking at what change management processes to put in place for planned changes and emergency fixes. What changes will be pre-approved, and what will need to go through a CAB (Change Advisory Board). What systems will need more scrutiny than others, and what data changes (rather than configuration changes) won't need approval at all. We also looked at how we will handle emergency fixes out of hours. Lots of heated discussion, and probably more questions than answers, but I'm sure our change manager will make sense of it!

This afternoon I got together with the rest of the Executive Team where we covered a whole range of things - from what titles we're using for staff, to feedback we're received recently about our services, and appointing a new PA to work with us. We also had a good discussion on some of the financial pressures facing all Universities at the moment, and how we might react to them.

Finally we met with a staff development colleague to discuss holding another "World Cafe" event for all staff in the department. This is part of our on going staff development programme, and the feedback on the last one we had was very good. The aim will be to bring all staff together so that they can have a say in how we go forward as a department, particularly in the light of challenges we are all facing in the sector. Hopefully it will produce some good outputs, as well as being an opportunity to network with colleagues, and be fun as well!

Assessor/Developer speaking

Today we had the first real session of our Management Development Programme which we're rolling out across the department. The aim is to help all of our managers to manage better, and to help all staff know what to expect from managers. Were starting with the Executive Team and the Section Heads/Service Managers but it will ulimately touch everyone on the department.

Last week we all completed an online questionnaire from which a Team Management Profile is produced for each individual. This shows the preferences we have at work when we're in a team - not skills, ie what we're good at, but what we prefer. It was fascinating - finding out if you're a Thruster/Organiser, or a Innovator/Creator for example! A number of different behaviours are scored - Introvert/Extrovert, or Structured/Flexible. One of the most interesting things was looking at our scores, and then lining up in order of our preferences, seeing who had similar preferences to us, and who's were most different. I'll give you all three guesses as to who scored highest in the extrovert category.......

We'll be using this information and other things we did during the day to draw up individual personal development profiles of where we want to improve.

Tomorrow I'm off to Glasgow with some of the executive team for the annual UCISA Management Conference, so expect some conference blogging in the next few days.

Coaching

Spent all of today on a training course with the rest of the Executive Team learning about coaching skills. Coaching is a technique used to bring out the best in people or a team, and is about helping people to analyse and solve their own problems, rather than giving advice or direction. It’s often linked or confused with mentoring – the difference being that a mentor is normally an expert in the field in which the client practices and offers advice – a coach isn’t an expert and doesn’t offer opinions.

We took part in a number of exercises looking at non verbal communication, listening skills and communication styles. We also learnt a coaching model, and saw a demonstration of coaching. Towards the end of the day we were able to practise coaching techniques on each other.

It was a fascinating day – most of us went into it to learn skills which we could use as managers, but I think most of us came out of it thinking that some coaching would be good for us as well.