Key Drivers

The project started by highlighting two main challenges facing the University. These challenges have continued through the life of the project, although the project has faced other challenges since starting. These new challenges will be mentioned in further sections.

The first challenge highlighted focused on University business and the requirement for award development to be responsive and agile, allowing staff to be able to design awards based on demand, in particular from Employers. It was recognized that there were no clear guidelines taking staff from demand of award to award delivery, and workflows/ processes were unclear and rigid  but at the same time subject to  modification by significant  local practice. It was also worth noting that during the baseline that the University did not have clear guidelines on what could be considered ‘agile’ or ‘responsive’, therefore the definitions were created via stakeholder interviews. Enable as a project had been designed to support existing, and new, initiatives within the university in moving successfully towards these targets by helping highlight where initiatives were hitting barriers or where changes to processes or technologies where needed outside the remit of the initiatives. Due to the wide scope of the Enable project the main driver was the University Plan, along with Faculty strategies and the Technology Supported strategic plan.

The second challenge was functional, focusing on issues faced by the institution in joining innovations together, forming a coherent basis for institutional change. The project team recognised that the institution had a number of ‘blockers’ to supporting institutional change. The Enable platform was envisioned to be a tool to provide evidence of these issues, communicating them to senior staff, to encourage discussion and, ideally, action. The Enable project was not designed to directly address the blockers but was in an ideal situation to highlight them with senior management as the project was seen as service/faculty neutral. The project team was in a unique situation of being able to provide advice on how innovation should be managed in the future across different services to senior management due to its neutrality and past experience of participating in initiatives that impacted a number of different services. Most members of the project team had also got previous credibility with senior managers. Further information is available about outcomes and lessons learnt in this area via the project blog