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

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.

The next step

We had a full day yesterday as a team working through the next step of the Enable project, talking about the final part of the Investigation phase and the evaluation plan and what we are actually looking at evaluating, considering the bi-polar nature of the project. We have noted the usefulness of the Archimate/ Enterprise Architecture work that Sam has been doing for the process of Curriculum Design and Dev and we are now planing to use the same method to look at how we manage the process of change with this area. By creating a baseline of how the situation is at the moment, and how Enable has already been embedded in how we get new issues raised with senior staff we can track how we want to move forward, what roles will be needed in the future and what works.
I have a number of jobs to do based on this day too, a number of documents that need to be written to summarise the work we have been doing up until now, a refined project evaluation plan and motivating stakeholders (such as the partners) to write not just scenarios about what they would like in an ideal world, but their expectations from the Enable project (and the spokes involved in it). When doing the evaluation we need to think about measuring the totality of impact of the spokes, rather than the impact of each individual spoke (as they should be doing that as part of their own projects). This again links to managing a programme of projects and requires a bit of research on how we can do that. I have a number of spreadsheets and questionnaires that should help with this process.

Where angels fear to tread

I have just finished a day at Bolton looking at the benefits of using Archimate (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Archimate_Workshop) for modelling the Business processes at the university, and the way it has been used in past projects. Before today I rather thought that Archimate should only be used for Enterprise Architecture purposes, however it seems that each project had used it in a slightly different way. The two that resonated most with me were Roehamptons examples and those by APS Ltd. I noticed that the use of Archimate was by Business Analyst roles in a team such as a programme office or, in one case an Innovation Projects Office. The projects ranged from one person involved to a team of three, although each person had other roles as well.

So why this blog title? This links to the realisation that there is a real recognition to having to have a team in place (linking to the Programme Office I have mentioned in previous blogs) that can map all aspects of the university. This team would be required to map at a certain depth for executive overview – however further mapping would be required for assisting particular projects. The issue is around funding the department, should this be costed (http://fcet-comments.blogspot.com/2009/05/call-for-efficiencies-in-universities.html) to each project as part of the expected work? At what depth should the mapping be done if a day to day role? It has been recognised that this team needs to sit outside of faculties and services to ensure that they are not perceived as having invested interest in particular projects or systems. Perhaps I need to think in terms of scenarios…

Scoping and Branding

Well the great work of Sam has paid off and the decision has been made to go with this as our logo (although we are checking with Marketing to ensure there are no problems with using this from a corporate perspective). It is a simple on button using the Staffordshire University red in both the text and the button itself. Let us know if you like it!

Yesterday Mark, Sam and I met with two of the initiatives involved in Enable, the Course Information/ Intranet Project lead and the lead for the Negotiated Award in FCET. The notes from these meetings are on another computer so will be looking at posting about them later in the week. Today I had my weekly meeting with Mark where we discussed the project scope and the criteria needed to identify the position of initiatives within Enable. This included looking at 4 types of projects

1. Transformative,
2. Improving,
3. Facilitating and
4. Supporting.

Those that fitted into 1 & 2 are either spokes or exemplars, those in 3 could be spokes, or not, depending on their nature, and those around supporting curriculum design and development were deemed to be out of scope. We also discussed further the outputs based on work done at the JISC meeting. This is so a leaflet can be put together for project dissemination and includes:

Goals

• Curriculum design development process which is coherent, responsive, customer focused, joined up etc
• Technologies in place to facilitate/ support in a flexible and responsive way
• Appropriate level of control and minimum bureaucracy, in terms of change process want a managed approach to change initiatives.

Outputs

• Process holes
• Process improvement opportunities
• Lack of data
• Process & system connectivity issues

As a result of these we should spawn new spokes, which help formulate the GOALS.

This work was discussed during our meeting with Cathy Gilbert who, from previous roles, has experience in programme management and has been very helpful in the area of supporting documents for this project.

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.