Enable Workshop

Yesterday I ran my first workshop at the Staffordshire University TSL conference focusing on the work that the Enable project is doing at trying to bring together the individual projects within the university. I did a few slides based around previous presentations on the background and what we were doing which led to some interesting discussions from the group around a few points that are worth noting:

• Tutors can feel disengaged from an institution, there was a feeling that tutors that don't feel included in strategy will pick their courses up and move to other institutions. It is important to have a strategy that does not appear to exclude a particular group of stakeholders that you are trying to engage (for example excluding post graduate awards etc)
• It is important for any programme team to be outside of any particular service (this reflected conversations at previous meetings such as at Bolton last week)
• It is equally important that senior management and executive are supportive and involved in the work taken on by the programme team - they felt that the Executive office was the best place for this type of work as easier to get attention of the right people at the right time.
  
• It was seen as beneficial that the Enable project team was small, with an innovative and familiar character (Mark Stiles) leading it.
  
• Any programme office/team should be seen as helping projects rather than reporting back to senior management, or enforcing views from top down.

I will post the video of Mark Stiles talking about Enable as part of his key speech later on.