Seeing change with fresh eyes

Yesterdays JISC programme meeting on Transformational Change & Demonstrating Impact was incredibly useful (See the Twitter Story for other peoples viewpoints)- first for the informal conversations that occurred during the sessions, and second for helping us as a project recognise what we have been able to achieve over the past 2 years. This is an important step for us as often it is easy to get stuck on what we haven't achieved rather than what we have. This made me feel very positive - we are indeed seeing a change in culture and attitudes in the university, if not changing behaviour, we are ensuring activity within the university is focused and driven by issues now and not solutions, and stakeholder engagement has certainly increased for new initiatives.

Part of the work was done before the meeting, where we were asked to think about six activities we had done as part of the project, and six outcomes we felt had been achieved. We came up with:
Activities

1. modelling of processes to communicate need for change
2. creation of validation documentation with built in guidelines for TSL and general support
3. developing an internal Flexible Learning Toolbox to support the development of new awards using workflow, probably drawing on Pineapple software and including linking roles, competencies to the e-learning models
4. Creating a pilot for Enterprise Architecture and supporting centralised
5. Guiding work in spoke development for example TransAPEL and investigating streamlining validation
6. developing a "change heap" to allow staff to input & search initiatives within the university.
   

Outcomes

1. Understanding the requirement for programme management (Programme, Portfolio, Project)
2. Embedding Enterprise Architecture into new innovations
3. Stronger governance for innovation that is not restrictive
4. Stronger relationships between college partners and faculties; Consistent message about partnerships
5. Reducing course development from +18 months to under a year
6. Understanding by executive / senior management for a holistic approach to managing change

   

At the time of completing this task we hadn’t really put much thought into how the two linked, which was an important part of the second session of the day – how were they linked, and what was the evidence? We were told to put a story together of the points above, and during the session (thanks to us trying to fit the same story example) we ended up in a bit of a mess, with a diagram with the need for supportive notes!

So today I tried the exercise again without thinking about the example or the distractions that were inherent in the session. This gave us a much more understandable diagram - which has helped in our understanding of where the project started, the outcomes that have been supported through the work of Enable, and the impact they have had on activities within Enable. I'm now wondering the value of us documenting activities, outcomes and evidence based on themes from Enable but I think that should be kept for the Cluster to create - and perhaps write more on. I'm going to think about sessions 3 & 4 (focusing on Transformation) and consider whether evidence needs to be added to this diagram? I will blog those thoughts, plus what was discussed on the day a bit later (otherwise would have a massive blog here!).

Dripping Tap

Over the last two years(!) we have been constantly sending out messages at all levels of the university, regarding managing:

• our projects using a Change Management Office Approach (i.e. P3M3)
• our information

Methods we have used included:

• One to one meetings- with a focus on faculty/service needs
  
  • with senior staff
  • with project managers
• raised at committee meetings
  
  • informally with a focus on issues raised in committees
  • presentations raising issues that have been raised during one to one meetings and how they link to points above
• Summary documents and articles

After hitting a number of issues with getting these messages across including:

• Loss of executive staff
• Loss of engagement when making presentations
  • Using wrong language
  • Not using relevant examples
  • no real examples of what success looks like
• Starting new initiatives without full stakeholder engagement
• Limited communication by projects outside of committees
  

We have now found that the message has sunk in at all levels, so would like to say to all our colleagues trying this to hang in there! We now get to hear the same message being said back to us during committees, and have got the new senior executive sponsor fully engaged with the project. After a few false starts initiatives are starting to be run with stakeholder engagement, communication across the university is growing (including the development of an online change service - more on that later). We are starting to look at projects from a central perspective and understanding that changes to one area of business impacts can impact other areas. So it's all good here at Enable.

Take me to your leader...

We have had an interesting few weeks where our Pro Vice Chancellor, our Executive Sponsor and the chair of our Senior Management Working Grouphas left the university. This could have had a big impact on the project, and left us with a number of questions. Who would become our new "leader", how would they feel about Enable, and how would it fit with their role in the university? These were big questions. Thankfully our Project Director, as head of department was facing the same questions and knew the right people to talk to, and temporarily at least, we are now reporting in to another member of the executive, the Deputy Vice Chancellor. This was good news, and better was to follow. Thanks to the practice we’ve had getting the message over to senior management and being further into the project we were able to communicate what the Enable project was about and how this related to University plans. This seemed to resonate with him and the Director of Academic Development. We are now busy writing some new documentation about how Enable can help with some possible executive-led initiatives that they are interested in exploring. What appears to be useful is that the focus is less on immediate quick wins but an understanding that making useful changes will take time and planning. More on that later!
Thanks to the work of Enable, and the cross dissemination we have been doing with the other institutions in the area, including the workshop we did in June around managing change, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Director of Academic Development have requested that Prof Mark Stubbs comes to talk to them and others involved in Enable about the work they are doing within the CDD programme at MMU. This is all very positive for the message we are communicating about managing change and information within our institution.

Reflections from Day 2 (pm) EISTA 2010

Academic Integrity was something discussed over lunch as it was the last presentation of the morning, this was done by Greg Williams who linked reducing cheating to strong instructional design (ID) (a systematic approach to curriculum development, using ADDIE - Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation). He believes that ID staff need to work closely with subject matter experts to get the best out of it. Sounds very similar to the work of the LDI team at Staffordshire University! We discussed the technologies that are supposed to help with cheating such as turnitin and a colleague mentioned a YouTube video can be found showing students how to get around this (and other) technologies. Greg spoke about the fact that a lot of elearning assessment is low level (true/false, multiple choice etc) and this assessment needs to be reviewed to support strong learning objectives that are more specific to learners and using world examples, and that the tutor needs to be involved further to the start of the assessment, reviewing drafts and feeding back on work already taking place.

The afternoon covered the session I was participating in. The presentation was kindly recorded by Nasir Butrous who also did a presentation in the session and I will be editing and publishing this soon, but have a video back log at the moment from the workshop in Stafford too. We had some good discussions around the role of a trusted individual in managing change in an institution, which was very useful. In the same session we had a presentation around Industry based assessment (ERP), which looked at supporting learners using relevant software in the classroom and getting employers engaged in developing the assessment so that they have real world examples to work with. Hiram Bollaert spoke about learning objects and I was surprised that this seemed a new term for a lot of the audience, along with IMS and SCORM. Hiram and I had an interesting discussion after his presentation around finding a SCORM player that does more than show SCORM packages but does all the tracking you want, that is also open/free/cheap and can be multilingual . Hiram discussed how the learners were the creators of the learning objects, helping them reflect, develop their ICT skills and encourages them to manage their knowledge. As they are displayed to a wider audience it also gives them recognision beyond their tutor.

Nasir spoke about how he had analysed online access patterns against student performance, by looking at learners accessing content online, and their performance at the end of the course he could see when the best time would be for tutor intervention on the course to improve performance.

Photos of Sam presenting at the last FSD Event

Sustaining Innovation and Enterprise Architecture

The last month has been quiet, mainly due to holidays and attending workshops that have resulted in giving me long to do lists! The month started with a workshop here at Staffordshire University, Sustaining Innovation via Organisational Development Workshop. This was a great day that resulted in some useful discussion around how we engage Senior Management in supporting innovation and embedding it into the day to day. We had guest speakers from Australia, Manchester and Plymouth (among others). I tweeted heavily on the event (and others I have attended) and to read them and others on Enable check out Twapper Keeper http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/jiscenable. Useful thoughts from the day included

• Mark Stubbs rethinking what we do with the curriculum. Asking fundamental questions, why is approval process face to face?


• interesting question from @markstiles about institutional values and data: secretive? open? risk-taker? risk-averse?


• Enterprise Architecture as a model for managing innovation but role of effective governance also critical


• USQ's Australian Digital Futures Institute - yes please! Can we have one?


• Strategy & structure need to be scrutinised & regularly realigned

After this event it was back to interviewing faculties about their involvement in working with External Examiners. We have learnt a lot with these interviews and discovered extra stakeholders involved that had not been considered during the review. We are now planning an extra round of interviews to get them engaged. The best way we have done this is with three of us attending each meeting, one specialist from QIS, our Technical Manager to roughly bring together a model as we talk and me, to make a narrative note of the processes and issues faced by stakeholders. This seems to work well with each of our different perspectives opening up more questions about what is happening in faculties at the moment and what they would like to see happen. Everyone (so far) has been pleased that something is happening to support the work taken in this area.

This week I have attended the Enterprise Architecture Workshop in Birmingham. A useful blog post has been written on this by John Townslend (http://jwt23.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/jisc-enterprise-architecture-practice-group-workshop-june-21st-ea-impact/), who usefully has blogged about the management stream that ran at the same time as the practitioner session I attended. The hands on session was very useful, with discussions about whether there is a right way to model, with a practical example that we could model using Archi (http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/) I was able to use this time to talk to our technical manager about my first attempt at modelling for one of our SURF colleges, which resulted in me re-modelling more explicitly and getting me up early on the second day to continue working on it before the sessions. You can certainly find yourself losing hours to working on models if you're not careful! The second day focused on the future of the group, what did we want over the next year, where did we want it held and did we see a future for the group to become a professional practitioners group as it grows in experience and numbers. There was also discussion around supporting the development of a foundation programme to support those who are just entering the EA arena, there were a lot of takers for the programme, including wanting to get Senior Management to get engaged with the programme so that they understood terms etc used by staff - although not have them attend the full 4 days. At the moment I am preparing for next weeks visit to Flordia for the EISTA 2010 conference where I am talking about managing strategic change in HE. I will let you know how that goes!

Taking a step back

I have been to two very different, and interesting, conferences over the last two weeks. The first was in Plymouth, a general elearning conference covering schools, FE and HE (http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/e-learning/). This was a packed two day event and it was difficult to see everything, however those sessions I attended were very good. The keynote speech by Josie Fraser discussed the web and privacy, the one by Dave White discussed how do we support what learners need and balance that against what they want, and has some interesting blogs on the subject (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/author/whited/).

I also did a presentation at the conference to a slightly smaller audience around supporting innovative curriculum in a traditional HE environment. This was a trail for Florida in June and was very successful, the discussions lasting 30mins after the presentation. There is a clearly recognised need by institutions to take a step back and look at what they are doing and why, without the caveat “we’ve always done it this way”. It was also acknowledged that some of the big barriers to institutional change that takes time and effort is engaging support from senior management, and getting them to understand that often quick wins are quick draws reinforcing the quid pro quo. The leaflet that went with my presentation is available from the project website (http://www.projects.staffs.ac.uk/enable/p3m3.html) although the slides are also available on the same page, my talk was slightly different to the one recorded. It is a shame I forgot to record the new presentation as some interesting points were raised.

The second conference was the JISC annual conference in London (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx). This one day event was also jam packed with good information. Martin Bean (VC Open University) did a great keynote to open the conference and I attended two useful sessions that support the work of Enable, including presenting our poster to the community.

Dissemination and promotion

The project has being focused on producing a Project Initiation Document to support the work it is doing around modelling course related information within CDD (Course Design and Development). It has also started working towards creating the “to be” view of CDD. The team has pulled out all the interview notes from different faculties about issues around CDD and also a list of issues from its interviews with the staff involved in the different initiatives at the university. I will be recording our next stage with some photos as we try and group together all the different suggestions and issues we have collated using post it notes.

Along with the work Sam has been leading we have also been meeting with deans in each Faculty to talk about their plans for the next year and to keep them up to date with the progress of the Enable project. This has been very useful and Mark will be writing up a summary sheet of our conversations, and about some of the issues that the deans see as needing to be addressed in CDD.

We have also been supporting the SURF Review, although we were unable to attend one of the meetings we have been able to pass on the issues highlighted by the project partners. There was some interesting discussions during this meeting between perception of progress from colleges, the university, and employers. Enable is supporting this work and has provided a lot of information from the partners experiences based not just on the annual report but on the spreadsheets we ask them to complete during the design and development process of a new idea.

Seeing as I called this a dissemination and promotion post I better say a bit about the dissemination we are planning to do outside of the university. We have had our abstract approved for the  Plymouth e-Learning Conference which is in April, and we are also presenting with the rest of our programme at the next JISC eLearning experts meeting in Birmingham in March, and the JISC Conference 2010 in London in April.

More snow time

As mentioned in my last blog the SMWG was supposed to be this week, however snow once again fell from the skies making it impossible to run, therefore it has been rescheduled for February. This is useful as there is now further discussion occurring at Executive level around the development of a programme office. We are waiting to hear what happens with those discussions and how they impact on the programme office governance and ideas we have already worked on in Enable. As part of the work we are doing for a programme office we are organising individual faculty meetings with Deans, heads of service, and FAD's as part dissemination about Enable and part discussion about their individual initiatives that could impact on the university, in the arena of CDD. This will then lead to meetings with those leading the initiatives to find out more about the work they are doing.
This leads on from last years interviews with internal projects and the issues mentioned in the last blog, along with these we have also managed to have most of the meetings with award leaders, finding out their experiences of validation, annual review and the 5 year review. We have had some interesting discussions about what would make these experiences easier and more responsive, and in one case had a good open discussion about the culture of lecturers and attitudes to senior/ executive management. These have been noted down to discuss at the next Enable team meeting.
Next week we have more internal Enable meetings, and we will also be talking with CETIS. Sam is also helping me with my first adventure into using BizzDesign Architect, could be interesting.
By now I was hoping to know whether a paper I have written on the development of a programme office in supporting a change in CDD had been accepted in the US but nothing has been said yet. I will let you know as soon as I do.

CETIS, Modelling and creating life

We have had a busy week, with three of us attending the CETIS Conference in Birmingham. This was a very useful event, mainly for the networking opportunities it gave, but also due to the great opening keynote from Roehampton University on the usefulness of Enterprise Architecture for institutions and the end Keynote from Bill Thompson (@BillT) about the concerns for where England will be with countries overtaking us with their technology backbones. Bill also covered whether we are ready for the big changes that could occur in the future with developments no longer in the realms of sci-fi (microchipped contact lenses, e-ink, next gen communication devices etc).
I participated in the Technology change in education - involving Senior Management at last? discussions on the first day where we covered areas such as who should be setting priorities agendas? How do we manage between the university and the staff cultures? We found out that JISC have a network set up to support those of us engaging in EA so we have great hopes for some useful connections from this group. We found a number of institutions were interested in the work we have already taken in this area, and we found an institution with a programme office which is very nice so we have agreed to talk soon about their experiences. It is clear that as I went through this conference the human element is the most important part of the programme office and supporting the EA at the university, so no pressure there!
These thoughts followed me back to the office as I have continued my research on Programme Management Offices, a big thing is that they can be different things to different people. We are trying to get to grips with what a PMO should be for us and how it can fit within the existing structure of the institution. Just like Frankenstein, we are wary of creating a monster office that tries to do too much at once, we don't want to see it crash through walls, but to be able to suggest and guide the university with incremental changes.

Programme Meeting in Manchester

Well it was an interesting two days in Manchester, I found them very useful, although often the session discussions did not have clear guidance the discussions we had during them were very useful. Participants used twitter to make general notes as the sessions went on and it's now time to go through them and weed out the useful points that need to be remembered. The main theme for the sessions I attended were around initiation and planning processes. We discussed how programmes are initiated can have an impact on the processes and how we have both supply and demand driven initiation processes. I really like the work being done by ViewPoint and could see their software being adaptable to the early initiation phase to help staff consider why an award is being developed with prompts to think about innovation, engagement, and rationalisation etc.
We discussed the fact that employers attend validation when involved in an award but do they attend annual monitoring, and should learners also be able to attend reviews on awards? We also discussed whether reviews should be annual but triggered by certain events - and what would they be and how would they occur. How do we value content from processes? We need to be able to look at time inovled, re-use of content created and what the outputs are.
This is just a sample of the thoughts raised at the event, so as you can see some interesting discussions took place, its just being able to clarify them for the project and how many can be considered/ actioned within the project. Especially considering this was just one of the themes from the event.

Video Released!

Well after a bit of editing, alot of messing around the video is now available via YouTube


Be kind!

Poster for the programme meeting

This is a small version of the poster for next weeks programme meeting that is being held in Manchester.

ALTC Presentation

As promised here is the conference presentation we did at ALTC, it is approx 14 mins long

Back from ALTC

Well what a three days! One of the first sessions after the keynote was the one done by Sam and myself (http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/talks/show/6792), which I recorded and will try and post either later today or at the start of next week. It was a very busy session which was very positive. Sam, Mark and myself attended a number of different sessions looking at different aspects of Curriculum Design and a number of symposiums where done by the different programme clusters.

The experience of ALTC can be broken into three areas – shared experiences, suggestions in supporting Enable and questions that need asking. A lot of my thoughts have been captured in my Twitter, and need collecting along with the fuller notes I made in the sessions. Some of these include:

• can we be more flexible with tasks in CDD and delivery?
• Getting academic trust in information from central services is difficult
• Need to keep in touch with other JISC projects to ensure not reinventing the wheel
• Learner built curriculum is now a big theme for lots of institutions
• How do we embrace the informal processes and feral systems?

ALT-C 2009

The main work for this week has been at getting ready for ALT-C and finishing off the baseline report for JISC. Sam has done a lot of model work to get the baseline together and done a great job. I was very lucky in the sections on programme management and change management in the university related to work I have already written for the executive and the senior management team. The presentation is something we have had to work on to ensure that Sam and I don't find ourselves repeating the same points, and to ensure that it relates to the baseline report now that is finished. Sam has taken time out to be able to make sure that both the presentation and the leaflet we are taking with us looks nice and professional. I have also been sorting out the final preparations for the cluster meeting at Stafford on the 23rd.

Documentation and preparation

As the project moves on we have now completed the evaluation plan - this will go up on the project website over this week (along with the project plan). I still have to go through the workpackages in more detail for the second phase of the project planning what needs to be done based on the meetings we have been having as a team over the last two weeks. Other project work has included registering for the ALT-C conference in September, as we are doing a short presentation on Enable and Enterprise Architecture (and Archimate) and sorting out a draft agenda for the cluster meeting we are hosting in September (which is looking to be a busy month). As part of the draft agenda we have asked Paul Barron to do a presentation on the work he is doing at the university, fingers crossed he will be able to attend.
Mark had a meeting with the Students Union which hopefully he will blog about here, and Sam and I have a follow up meeting in July, along with a number of catch up interviews with initiatives we last spoke to in January. These interviews will be very focused to create baselines for the project with regards to expectations and defining things like "quicker" and "better" that were used in the project bid. We are also looking to use the work we have already done to redefine the project "problem" as per the bid and project plan.
As part of reporting to senior management we have pulled together a summary document on the main issues with initiative management in the university and have also given them a copy of the leaflet I did for my course that links to the presentation I did at the last SMWG.
Project Partner involvement is still growing, although it has been noticed that some partners are more involved at this point than others. I am wondering whether it is time to get on the train and do some more visits on this.

Video Dissemination

Here is the promised video (approx 5mins long):

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.

Dissemination

As part of a presentation Prof Mark Stiles did for an internal conference on "Seize the Technology" Mark mentions the work of the Enable project and how it is disseminating the work it is doing to people in the university and the wider community.

This part of the presentation is just under 3mins long.