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!).

For the Greater Good

Sorry about the Hot Fuzz start to this blog, but it matches the out comes quite nicely for the programme meeting we had yesterday.

Last week has been interesting for the project. In discussions with one spoke it was clear that some changes had been made to the processes around course design with little expectation of making a large impact on the creation of more flexible awards. This matched discussions at the programme meeting about whether changing processes and documentation alone will make the desired changes we need within institutions. There is hope that the changes made as part of the spoke will support more responsive curriculum design and a slicker curriculum portfolio. Discussions then turned to how these expectations would be evaluated, there is some difficulty in this a much of the baseline for the spoke was based on perceptions. The spoke will be using the expectation spreadsheet it completed at the start of the project along with the JISC Evaluation workshop notes, to support the evaluation process. The spoke is also reviewing the usefulness of recording date information against each stage of the process for faculties to measure responsiveness.

The JISC programme meeting raised an interesting discussion around institutions expectations of learner and staff cultural attitudes to technology and how this differs between institutions. As we, in the project, talk a lot about culture being a barrier to change is there a practical way of addressing this? Bolton spoke briefly on training they are providing for staff around supporting using technology for learning. Does Enable need to think about putting together training for staff to help manage these cultural attitudes, using faculties who we have identified as already making those changes? I’m not sure we would be the right people to do this but we can try talking about it to the right people. Some projects in the programme have created tools to help staff identify their teaching approaches and what others are doing in their institution.

The final part of the day was a discussion summarising the work projects have been doing and how it can be used to help others, stopping duplication of effort at a higher level than simply within an institution. The projects discussed whether it would be possible for them to bring together the combined effort using design studio or whether it was something that needed to be organised centrally with everyone in a room. The idea of an information roadmap was seen to be useful and projects were happy to provide information to support it, although what information was needed and in what form was difficult to determine. Some felt that information needed a context within a process map (or in a model) and Bolton demonstrated the work they were doing with the FSD programme. I personally feel that a generic model to support staff with a starting point for discussion would be useful, and that validation documents themselves would be of little value. Perhaps a quick model/map with each stage a clickable link to a list of information collected/used would be best. It will be interesting to see the out come of this session will be.

Added 24/05/2010

Further relevant blogs:

http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/2010/05/19/sustaining-curriculum-change/

http://blogs.cf.ac.uk/palet/entry/jisc_programme_meeting_brass_tacks

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.

Supporting Innovation

It has been a week of thought, discussion and production of media for the programme meeting next week. I have to say I spent some time on this, the poster should have been a quick job, and in fact the design of it was, but getting the computer to produce the required output resulted in a number of “may be out of space” and “out of memory” errors that resulted in an afternoon of me swearing at the computer! If, as someone with a “high spec” computer has so much trouble doing this simple task is it reasonable to expect staff at the university to be able to do this, and more with the technology they are provided with? Even producing the video for YouTube resulted in a number of software crashes and restarts that would cause frustration in an end user – do I want to send a report to Microsoft and let them know I have a a problem? Yes and I would also like Microsoft to fix it thanks very much!

I have also blogged on the more personal http://jiscenable.wordpress.com site about ALTC and how there is a perception of slowing innovation, based around discussions at ALTC. I also found the CETIS blog on barriers to innovation interesting (http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/christina/2009/10/07/barriers-to-innovation/) which references a future lab report, with barriers that include Leadership, Shared Vision and Change Management, among others. This links nicely to the Enable project which is trying to address those particular barriers.

Capturing Perceptions

Last week was very busy, and this week will continue in that theme. We had a partner visit and tt was the programme meeting in Birmingham. This was followed by a presentation on Strategy and leadership for my course, which I started to support the work of Enable.

 UPDATE: 

This presentation has since been used at EISTA 2010 and published in Journal of Education, Informatics, and Cybernetics, Vol 2, No 3, 2010. 

This course has since been completed and I have now started an MSc in Innovation and Managing Change in Higher Education by Negotiated Learning. I have finished my first module for this but will be putting the award on hold while I go on maternity leave. 

This week I am doing a fair bit of training The main aspect is looking at TOGAF and ArchiMate with CETIS in Bolton tomorrow. 

UPDATE: 

Blog available on this day here: Enable: Where angels fear to tread 

I am also doing some mentoring/coaching as part of the next stage of my course, this work focuses on supporting another member of staff working on a large scale project. In between these days I am still looking at evaluation and capturing perceptions of stakeholders, and at the structure of a project team event for the end of June.

Perception Questionnaires

I have been given a very useful questionnaire from Cardiff University that originated at BAE on finding out what people want from a project, and then measuring how successful we have been in providing it in the future. The questionnaire has been adapted from BAE and to asks the project lead (or stakeholders in the project) the following:

• List 5 achievements for the project
• For each of the 5 achievements score them 10 (Most Important) - 1 (Least Important)
• For each of the 5 achievements score them 4 (Delighted with how it works at the moment) to 1 (Very Dissatisfied with how it works at the moment).

Each score was asked for twice, the initiative and for Enable. The project lead (or stakeholder) is then asked for what they consider the 'Big One' (i.e. high need but very dissatisfied with at the moment) and the 'Pat on the Back' (i.e. high need but delighted with at the moment).

This has gone out to our project partners via the VSN. I also found a useful questionnaire online "The Organisation Perception Questionnaire" although this relies on rating some statements, so the team needs to think about what needs to go in there.

UPDATE:

The Organisation Perception questionnaire has not been used by Enable, however the BAE questionnaire was used (as adapted above) during the first stage of the Enable project and was found to be extremely useful when revisiting expectations against the reality and being able to capture what was/not achieved and why. It was used in conjunction with a semi-structured interview technique and a Project Overview document to support the Enable team in understanding the outputs expected from each initiative, what outcomes could be expected, and what overlaps might exist with other initiatives running in the University at the same time. This work all fitted with the Programme/Change Management approach adapted by the project team. Further information on evaluation techniques used by the Enable team will be available in August 2012,  through the Evaluation Story & Final Story written for JISC

Partner Engagement

Partner engagement has really picked up after visits have been completed at the partner sites, we are seeing blogging from tutors in Shrewsbury college on the VSN. Hopefully more blogs and discussions will grow in the next few months with the support of college coordinators such as Emma, Richard and Gerard. I will be sending out a reminder email to them all towards the end of the week to ensure that they are all happy with what is happening at their colleges.

UPDATE:

A blog post has been written to cover partner engagement from the perspective of the Enable project team.

Programme Meeting

The Programme meeting in Birmingham had a few useful sessions, although in some cases information was appearing at the wrong level for some project managers. I certainly found the networking activities/ directed discussions very useful although the form filling in the afternoon was probably less informative. One session focused on understanding your organisational type as part of Change Management/ Engagement Strategies. When we looked at the type of organisation we felt Staffordshire University was we were surprised to see such a strong leaning to Innovative Culture, however we felt that we needed a balance across some of the other cultures, in particular Business. There was some interesting engagement methods used by some of the presenting projects that I would like to consider for projects at the university, including posters in hallways for commenting on with post-its and workshops that included stakeholders to look at how they see failure rather than success! There was still not enough "here is how we did it" - in particular the change academy model was used by a project - what is this and how did they modify it and why? It looks like some investigation on their website as it was not easy to find on the HEA site.

Feedback, Planning and Meetings....

We have had some feedback about the logo, fortunately it is all positive and therefore we now officially have a logo! Thanks to Sam for his hard work on this and to Marketing for giving us a nice vector version of it.
We are still organising initial meetings for the different initiatives highlighted by the SMWG, as we are making initial contact there has been some issue with project staff understanding the purpose of Enable and their involvement. However this has been addressed with a simple email paragraph to explain what the project is and how they have been identified as a person of interest.
Mark has been talking to the MIAP (Managing Information Across Partners) project (external) around the unique learner number, and how it can be implemented as a pilot in Staffordshire University. This linked to the work I did at the CETIS conference around supporting flexible provision and around technology supporting WBL, and whether this project would be of use to the community (yes!). We also looked at how processes needed to change. We looked at the Validation process, which links nicely with the work being done in QIS and I will need to send my notes on this to Sue Lee, the project manager for DIVAS. The CETIS conference will be written up more on my own blog, along with my thoughts on the training I had yesterday with Sam around complex project management.

Diff'rent Strokes!

The Progamme meeting in Oxford was at the start of this week and went really well. We have now all been asigned to different cluster groups based on project similarities. We worked together for the two days in discussing what we hoped to achieve and although we had different projects we were all very interested in what the other projects where trying to achieve.

To work out which group we belonged in we had to do a short TV show pitch to the group on the project. Here is what was prepared for the day, although we could not use it on the day.



While we put the our pitches to each other we relaxed in large bean bags rather than using the normal chair setup!



During the session "Tomorrows World" we put together a list of successes for 2012 that I thought would be worth recording here.
Outcomes

• Coherent and flexible product portfolio which is sufficiently small to be effective
• Better student experience
• Regional and national employers engaged with the university which is known to be responsive in nature
• Business processes around curriculum design are sufficient and operate coherently across partners
• Above processes will be transparent to all involved
• Use of technology to support and enhance is both diverse and connected
• Policies exercise minimal level of control while sustaining innovation.
  We also have a programme level community site that I need to take a look at.