Birth, Death and Resurrection of Senior Management Engagement

At the start of the project a new Executive Pro Vice Chancellor (PVC) for Learning and Teaching had been appointed, who was the initial sponsor of the Enable project. The main role of the Executive PVC, was to chair the Senior Management Working Group (consisting of a number of senior faculty staff (Deans and/or Faculty Directors for Learning and Teaching) and a number of Directors/Heads of Services and senior colleagues. 

In addition to the start of a new PVC, the then Vice Chancellor had indicated that she would soon be retiring but had yet fixed a date.  This was subsequently confirmed as January 2011.  As a consequence, the academic years 2008/9 and 9/10 were characterised by certain amount of “planning blight” and senior managers being (understandably) cautious in the face of impending change.

Not only did the executive start the project in some state of organisational churn, so did the department the Enable team were working from. The Learning Development & Innovation (LDI) team had recently been moved (following an external review) from the University’s Information Service to the Academic Development Institute (led by the Director of Academic Development).

After the first four months of the project the Academic Development Institute was abolished and the LDI team (including all Enable project staff) became a standalone team reporting to the Executive PVC.   During this period, senior management engagement with the project was good .  There was also considerable engagement from staff involved in the various change initiatives across the University, and from award leaders, programme managers and Faculty business staff and quality administrators.

About 18 months into the project, the Executive PVC left the University (and was not replaced for about a year). Following a fairly lengthy hiatus during which it was unclear (even to the Head of LDI) who the LDI team reported to, it was agreed that the team and the Enable project should report to the Deputy Vice Chancellor through the Director of Academic Policy and Development.   Senior management engagement had waned somewhat during the “hiatus” (but “spoke” engagement had remained good), however the Deputy Vice Chancellor became very receptive to the ideas on managing change and sustaining innovation being promoted by Enable, and a good period of senior management engagement ensued.  However, this period also coincided with the “last days” of the previous Vice Chancellor and the selection and arrival of the new Vice Chancellor, who took up leadership of the University in January 2011. As a result, although engagement with Enable’s ideals was good, translation of this engagement into action was very difficult.  However, this period also saw the opportunity – seized by the Enable team – to initiate the “FLAG” work of Enable on the back of a number of Senior Leadership Team initiatives instigated by the new Vice Chancellor.

In June 2011, a new Executive PVC arrived at the University.  At this point, oversight of the LDI team moved into the new PVC’s purview although the Head of LDI continued to report to the Director of Academic Policy and Development who had similarly moved reporting lines.  This move created another “disjoint” in senior management engagement as the new PVC obviously had a great many things to take on board and to plan.  

By the end of the project, 7 of the 17 people who attended the first SMWG meeting had left the University, including the Executive PVC. Nevertheless engagement was subsequently renewed and the Executive team has now picked up messages  sent by Enable including the concept of ‘joined up thinking’, and the development of a Change Management role.  This renewed interest was due to the project team able to present a clear message of Enable to the executive thanks to previous experience with communicating with the executive team, along side this the project team were able to use senior management champions to pass the message of Enable on to the executive.

Despite the considerable “organizational churn” evidenced above, a constant and stable factor throughout has been a recognised institutional need to ensure curriculum development is responsive to demand.   This included ensuring that policies, processes, and supporting technologies for curriculum/product development were designed in a way that was responsive to the needs of both faculties and learners.   This required flexible management of the existing portfolio including the process for creating new product, along with guidelines and workflows to encourage a culture of innovation. 

We make it so hard

Thank you Mark for the welcome back!

As Mark said in the last Enable Blog, the Enable methodologies are being successfully embedded into relevant plans and strategies, and more importantly the message that we need to think about our information as a whole and separate to our systems is becoming widely accepted within the university and we are hearing it repeated at different committees, and was widely accepted at our SMWG meeting.

The SWMG meeting on Friday, left us feeling very positive about what we have already done and the way we can move forward. We spoke about the recognised opportunities that adopting Enterprise Architecture & Programme Management would give the university, and that the lead for this needed to come from Executive. More importantly Executive recognised the need for them to be able to lead it and have gone away with a number of papers, with actions, to consider. We look forward to what takes place over the next few months.

Rather interesting it was clear that discussions around how the university needs to have a corporate view of university systems/ information/ processes, and how we manage them had taken place in other meeting where it had been deemed "to hard", and that it was easier to focus on changing small issues without recognising the projects longer term impact. We discussed that we make things hard for ourselves - by repeating the same mistakes the job becomes harder. We need to understand is using EA / TOGAF too hard? Or is it simply a matter of understanding that it's a job that needs doing, requires time and (the right) staff to enable it to happen (with the right governance)? Once this understanding has taken place and actions taken surely it is simply a matter of time and effort rather than any sort of brain surgery/rocket science? We shall see!

Another useful message we managed to communicate during the SMWG meeting was that stakeholder engagement was vital to successful engagement in managing change and the curriculum development - and this doesn't simply mean engaging in committees. It means talking to people and, importantly listening with out judging/ justifying.

Lastly we were able to successfully demonstrate the two mini projects External Examiners and TransAPEL - but we were very clear that Enable used these two mini projects as proof of concept and was not something the Enable team should be doing day to day. We need to focus on the wider aspects of Curriculum Design and Development, and help the university make good choices in the future about project work and developing its business processes etc. We need to be able to advise the Executive but not be those who implement it. It will be interesting to see how our developments are (if successfully piloted) will be embedded into the university processes. Watch here over the next few months as both systems enter a piloting phase.

Edit (07/02/2011)
Our Presentation (with sound) to the SMWG

Having a n-ice new year

Sorry about that! Things are quiet for me at the moment, as I have been house bound for the last three days thanks to the ice on the roads by where I live. Fortunately Sam has been carrying on with interviewing staff around the curriculum design processes for mapping and for capturing more issues. We have created a long list of issues from the 2009 interviews, as part of this I have tried to group them in different areas and themes it seems that the issues can be broken down into the following areas:

• Strategy (Culture, Product, Resourcing)
• Student Support (Communication, Marketing, Systems)
• Course DD (Communication, Annual Monitoring, Marketing, Engagement, Product, Processes)
• Course Information (Communication, Systems)
• Course Support (Resourcing)
• Global (Communication, Culture, Engagement, Id Management, Processes, Project Management, Resourcing, Systems)
• Partnerships (Communication, Marketing, Processes, Progression, Resources)
• Project Management (Resourcing, Scoping, Systems, Timescales)

These will be discussed further at next weeks SMWG as long as snow doesn't get it cancelled. We really need this SMWG as the last few have been cancelled due to clashes either with JISC events or with other senior management meetings. We were hoping to be discussing the Programme Office principle at this meeting but it looks like this has got bigger than Enable and the executive are now interested in the model I have documented. Not sure what is going to happen next on this, but all sounds very positive still.

Other than the spreadsheet I have been catching up on previous Elluminate sessions that JISC have been running via the circle network, and managed to catch one live on Wednesday thanks to working from home. Some interesting discussions are going on out there on how to manage organisational change and addressing cultural issues to changing curriculum delivery.

Over the next week I am expecting some interesting reports from our project partners summarising their experiences over the last year with Staffordshire University. Will report on these and other points raised in this blog as soon as I can :)

Merry Christmas

Well this will be the last blog before the Christmas break, so Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from me to you. This week has been mainly working on the interim report, adding more detail to the outcomes we have had so far and adding useful information from the report to the website so others can see information about the project, this includes the issues raised from the first year of the project, and the development of the programme office. I have also changed the tone of the report based on the knowledge that it will be published online for all to see.

At the team meeting this week we have continued discussion on the governance of the programme office that will be raised next week with the Pro Vice Chancellor, along with what to name the office. I'm tempted towards "Enterprise Programme Office" as it is across the enterprise and seems to be an accepted term in business, however there has been some discussion about the fact that "Enterprise" has a different meaning in HE and that it should be called something generic such as "University Programme Office". We will have to see what our Executive think. It is an interesting idea that we should be changing what is a recognised term to something that fits the language of the HE environment even while saying that we need to change our language to fit that of employers to assist in employer engagement in award development.

We have also been discussing our modelling work, we need to get a head with this over the next couple of months as it will be vital to have a "To Be" model to support the programme office and also to support the work we need to create useful models within the pedagogic planner Phoebe. I have also submitted my first paper to an international conference, relating to embedding EA and Programme Management into an institution. I am keeping my fingers crossed!

Our project partners are working hard at the moment creating their first snapshot report based on the work they have been doing for Enable. I have already received one draft - thanks guys - which was interesting reading. I am looking forward to the others arriving before the next SMWG meeting so that the findings can be covered in the meeting.

Flexible Service Delivery

It has been a busy week, I have been writing a paper for a conference next year on developing an Enterprise Programme Office and using Enterprise Architecture. This has coincided with the FSD JISC meeting down in London and discussions with our Finance Director. All of which have helped with giving me clear ideas of how we should be working as a university, and how to communicate the work both internally and externally to the project.

The discussion with the Finance Director lead to “imagine if..” statements which give basis to the “To Be” model that we need to build into our modelling. I need to capture these for sharing with the project team. A number of our “imagine if” scenarios relate to the work done by the FSD programme. The workshop I attended was on behalf of Sam, but in fact, I can see a real benefit to attending these events as a project manager, as well as those with a more technical leaning. There was a lot of useful discussion about enabling institutions to talk to vendors with one voice, and enabling institutions to be clear about their requirements by using Enterpise Architecture. Although EA isn't the be all and end all it is certainly a useful framework that can be used to help FSD and has helped the Enable project, and the institution, including giving us structure to collating evidence of behaviour within the university. It has also helped us identify the need for an Enterprise Programme Office that fits with the existing Executive Programme Office that already exists.

Here is a useful blog from the session by John Townsend (Liverpool John Moore) who was part of the last afternoon session group I participated in around effective change as part of the FSD business case. He reflects on the the idea of a Programme Office, and the need for effective governance. The governance put in place by Enable has been very useful in effecting change with the use of the SMWG but we need to be clear that the governance needs to go further to support our Enterprise Programme Office.

Enable keeps spinning

As mentioned in the last June blog, this month has been fairly quiet due to Summer Holidays, which will be continuing over August too. Still things have been happening in the world of Enable.

At the start of July we had an interesting meeting with the Student Union with regards to using their members to help spokes engage with learners, they are very interested in supporting Enable and engaging learners in the process of curriculum design and development more than they have been recently. This is really positive news that will be passed on to the spokes.

Straight after the Student Union meeting we met with a possible new Spoke around the subject of supporting learners through APEL to make it quicker, and more efficient that the existing process. This is a new idea that has been submitted to JISC for funding, although the Project Initiation Manager is hoping that the project will go ahead regardless, as there is a real benefit to the university if it goes ahead. Whilst in this meeting we got some feedback about the usefulness of Enable, where the Project Initiation Manager was very positive, calling us Critical Friends for the project and useful for bouncing ideas off and getting a different view point than thinking about their particular area. This is very good news!

We have also spoken to Paul in the executive office about Programme Management at the university, and managing change. We are going to put together a document for the Executive to cover the work Enable is doing and the work that the Executive Office are doing around this area and how we are working together.

We have now finished the Investigation phase and now in the refinement phase as part of which I am doing some work for the next SMWG meeting, to include a general list of issues around CDD and around change management that can be discussed and prioritised. We are also doing a second round of interviews, including a closing interview with DIVAS.

Summer Holiday

Well you may have noticed that blogs have been a bit thin on the ground, this is due to a number of reasons, one of which links to the summer holidays, I have been enjoying some short weeks, and will continue to be doing so until the end of August (which is nice!) as has my colleague. Sam has been working hard on the baseline for JISC and the project, while that has been going on we have also been talking about the next stage of the project, the review, while sorting out the next stage of interviews, and attending JISC workshops on Phoebe and Learner Engagement. All these things have been very interesting and are worthy of mention.

The Learner Engagement workshop was very interesting and linked nicely to a meeting I was in the day before with our study skills team, and I will be passing my notes from the day on to them and other spoke projects we are engaged with talking to. As part of the day the project team need to write a learner engagement plan, which I have started, and am hoping that the rest of the team contribute to before the 15th July (when it needs to be "handed in"). I will be using the information from this day during the meeting with the Student Union too.

As part of the next stage of the project, we have created a new, closed, Elgg group at Staffordshire University to discuss issue groups (such as do we even want to call them issue groups) and the up and coming SMWG that we are planning for at the end of July. We are still putting notes from events and interviews up into our open Elgg group so that our spokes can see what is going on, and I am in talks with the Elgg administrator to see if we can get any useful statistics out of it about views to see if it is being used at all.

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.

SMWG: A Third Issue - Resources

Resourcing is a recognised issue that has been raised with the Enable project, and with other members of the SMWG at different meetings, although the project is highlighting the issue it recognises that it sits outside the scope of the project.

SMWG Presentation: Strategy and Change

As promised here is the presentation I gave yesterday to the SMWG around Strategy and Change Management. Due to the presentation being images only you will need sound. I have tried to summarise what I said at the presentation.

Getting together

So far this week there is a big focus on getting together, first with the colleges on Monday and then yesterday with the Senior Management Working Group. This meeting was to give an update on the progress of the project, including updates on the interviews from initiatives and the work taking place on process mapping. As part of this work we presented two short presentations, the first covering previous blog rants on joining up university level strategy to work taking place on the ground, the second around understanding the issues with resourcing new and flexible course development. During today I will post both these presentations up here. I was also hoping to put a short presentation up from Mark which I recorded last week on the Enable project, yesterday I forgot the cables and today I forgot my phone so you will have to wait another day before you see it!

one week and one day ago

I released the Elgg network to the SMWG last week and found that only one member has managed to successfully join the network. We will have to keep an eye on this and see if the others join slowly over the next few weeks, or even just before the next working group in March.
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Edit 02/2011
Since then all members have successfully accessed the Elgg (SUN) site and it has been used to disseminate the different aspects of Enable to those SMWG members unable to attend the meetings. It has also been used to store sanitised versions of the interviews for members to read, and has started some useful conversations. Using it as a consistent source of information for the SMWG has helped make it successful. As a whole using Elgg has been very successful for internal communication, much better than using outside tools that can change their charging models at a moments notice (Ning/ Grou.ps).
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There have been a number of discussions this week about the role of Enable and how it should work in the university, the main idea being that this project is a "programme" that focuses on managing change around Curriculum Design and Development, to include looking at the curriculum, the student experience and learning and teaching. Rather interestingly the Executive are also looking at starting and number of change groups in these areas, as well as Research. This could end up with being a duplication of effort or confusing roles. How will Enable be fitted into these groups? This is something that has been top of our minds this week as we go on with our work.

Other thoughts have been around CETIS's phone call and supporting the change of the learning and teaching using PHOEBE, this is something that will not be addressed in Enable yet. However these thoughts raise the question do we need an initiative that will look at ways to use HIVE and learning object creators in the best way? This will be something that can be thought about more when we get the latest version of HIVE as some software that comes with it may answer some of the questions being raised at this point.

New Year, No moss

The new year has now got rolling, and the project is still moving forward, so there is no moss sticking to the sides ;). There have been a number of project meetings including one around Distance Learning which was very interesting, and a SMWG meeting that was this morning. We had a number of the SMWG missing from today's meeting which was a shame but we still had some interesting discussions around the Spoke issues identified so far, the MIAP initiative and how it could be part of the work on Roles and Indentity Management, and the project progress. Role and Identity Managment is still the main issue that has been highlighted by the project and is something Mark is working with the IS team to create some scoping criteria. We then raised a second issue at the meeting around Course Information. Mark provided a presentation on this:



For the rest of this week I have an evaluation day to attend in Birmingham, and then I will be finishing off the first draft of the project plan for submission to JISC on Friday. We are also having a second partner meeting on Friday for those who could not attend the first one last year.

Scoping and Dissemination

This week our project meeting was on Monday, which linked to the Strategic Team Meeting we had at the end of last week. The core project team has now all registered at the JISC CircleSpace site and we have also published our project overview document on the site. This used the information from the JISC template, but the layout was changed to make it easier to read. This got a positive response from the team members that have seen it.
The project partners have now been sent the minutes from the last meeting, after being approved by Richard Benefer. I have also written the first draft of the consortium agreement which is with Mark and Richard for approval before going out to the partners. We have still yet to see two of the partner colleges, but on a positive side we are going to our first on site visit next week at Newcastle College.
After problems with branding Mark and I have written a short brief to go to the Marketing team along with some sketches of thoughts from within the team, these were harder to do than expected but hopefully Marketing will come through for us.
We also need to think more about dissemination, I spoke to the Enterprise and Commercial Development team who were not aware of the Enable bid. so we now have a meeting organised next week to see if they know of any other initiatives in the university that could be useful to the Enable project. We have also discussed the use of a centralised calendar to promote work being done by the project, so I need to consider what type of calendar to use, should it be embedded in this blog? In the Forum? Who would be the intended audience for this?
So what next?...well Mark will be putting together a draft scoping document and put together a short leaflet for senior management. Sam is planning to continue investigation of technologies, and processes within the University. I will be attending meetings with the Spokes with Sam and Mark, along with looking at examples of agile programme management.

Whats new pussy cat?

Which will teach me to listen to the radio whilst writing this blog!

This last week I have posted onto the forum the:

• Roles of the core project team
• Roles of SMWG.

I am waiting for confirmation on the role of the partners before that too can go up and the Structure can then also be published with links to each of the project roles. We have also had a good response from the project spokes, and most of the overviews have now been published on the forum. We have started to make a number of appointments with the spoke Project Managers, and have the first one this afternoon - Project Partners.

I will be busy this week with a number of small tasks including starting to draft the consortium agreement for the project partners and creating a scoping document for agreement at the next SMWG meeting. Mark will be trying to organise a meeting with IS with regards to Identity Management and also with Cathy Gilbert to discuss Programme Management as she has previous experience on managing programmes.

Mark and I have agreed that the best way to handle dissemination to the SMWG is a weekly update email that will include links to the blog and the forum and give bullet point updates on the progress of the project, then they can read more here (or in the forum) if they want.

Structures and Roles

Over the last week the project has been pulling together information around the project team, formalising roles and the structure of the project. This should make it clear to the project team how we all fit together. These documents are going to go into our respository and given out to the Senior Management group using the forums.

Mark has also found a number of Change Management documents that I will be reading in the near future, along with my new book on Agile project management. As the project has been identified as more of a programme than a project both Sam and myself are looking to go to the JISC Infonet training event in Nottingham on Programme Managment.

At the moment we can't create our consortium agreement until we meet with the missing project partners, which hopefully will be in the next few weeks as we want to be up front about what is expected. In the meantime we will be trying to meet with the different project spokes and with other interested teams in the University.

First Senior Management Working Group meeting

All went well at the SMWG meeting on Tuesday, we almost had a full complement of senior managers and everyone had something to contribute to the meeting. After introductions Mark went through a presentation covering the context of the project (this is quite long so may take some time to load):



Mark also introduced the first of the Issues that the project is hoping to raise awareness off (and hopefully find a solution to). Sam (the Technical Manager for the project) did a great job with a presentation on Identity Management which was found to be a barrier in a number of recent projects including SUNIWE and SURF WBL-Way:



This got the SMWG talking about how they should raise awareness of this problem and how it should be addressed. There was consensus around the table that this was a big issue for the University and was something that needed to be addressed.

A lot of questions were around the project documentation and governance and as the project moves forward a number of these documents will be released. We will be using our local repository, HIVE to store project and spoke documents, and they can be accessed by the project via the closed forum created in phpBBServer.