Models to flows to Information, Advice and Guidance

As mentioned in 'Flying Forward' the Enable team, and others in the department, have been working on creating a ToolBox (known internally as the FLAG project) for supporting curriculum design and development for those roles involved in the process.The project team started with the original baseline models and then modified them based on the existing information available on the websites, once a 'trail' process was in place interviews took place with Teaching & Learning Directors, faculty quality staff, and the Director of Quality Improvement.



The first thing we learnt with using the model from the original baseline was that the 'viewpoints' hadn't been fully considered, and were therefore either too detailed or included too many different roles. Therefore the team went back and created models from the viewpoint of the person who had come up with the new course idea.

Example: Stripped down ArchiMate view used for discussions

This then raised a number of issues with complexity of the processes, and how the main process of 'Create a new Course' consisted of different, lower level processes, and what course initiators and designers needed to consider as opposed to a module designer. The main process was broken down to different processes, and as such different views:

• Approving the idea in Faculty,
• Approving the idea in the institution,
• Developing the Idea,
• Preparing for Validation

To keep it simple we needed the 'parent' process (Create a New Course) to go into Pineapple and become the backbone of FLAG (creating a work-flow that would be developed around the 4 sub processes above).  This backbone would then allow the stakeholder engaged in CDD to move to 'child' work-flows whenever needed (we would consider developing partners a child process of getting the idea approved in Faculty).

Stakeholders happy with the high level process of CDD could then directly move to specific child process they could be struggling with (How do I set up an international partner? What can I do differently around assessment? etc).

This was great in theory,  however it was noted that there was no clear way to link process within Pineapple. Thankfully the Plymouth team were contacted before we started this project and have been very supportive in developing Pineapple to support processes beyond the original intention of APEL. After putting together a specification document for this change they are now working on making this possible.

UPDATE: 
2012/07 It is now possible to create parent, child and grandparent relationships between processes within Pineapple. 

Enable had already noted that the course development process was under review, and that faculties have their different ways of doing their side of the development process. The creation of the 'trail' process within Pineapple has helped us identify a baseline for faculties and the Quality Improvement Service to discuss and view issues/ holes already highlighted. It helped those engaged in the process see how the tool would be used, identify differences in their processes & best practice, and inform us of any useful information/advice/ guidance (IAG) that they provide to members of staff for the different steps.

UPDATE:
2012/07 The review of course development processes is almost complete, and discussions with business owners means that FLAG will soon be handed over to our Quality team. The new process is already partly in FLAG and once approved the Quality team will make it live to users.  

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.

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!

Working together

This week has me reading a number of blogs from our partner colleges, this has made for some interesting reading. Mainly they pick up on the same issues that we have already noted but every now and again a real gem of an issue appears, two examples include:

• If validation can't occur before Sept 2010 college is looking at having to wait a year to deliver - is this because of the university? because the college doesn't like "mid" year starts, or don't the learners?
• Awards are running but access to the VLE across partners is difficult or can be delayed by a year - again why?

With these issues (and others) I am feeling a bit like the kid in school who likes to pick at scabs! As part of this scab picking process we are organising meetings with the UK Partnership office to put a model together of how they deal with CDD with the partners and to see how processes etc help/ hinder or have gaps that need to be filled. This will be my first attempt at modelling although I will have Sam there to help me. I am also planning to try out the new CETIS Archi tool as my laptop with BizzDesign on it has been taken in for another repair.
We are also starting work on the "mini project" which is our pilot on testing not simply technology solutions to issues around External Examiners but Programme Management and Enterprise Architecture also get in on the deal. We have our first set of interviews around this work at the start of May, before that our Technical Manager is sorting out the technical issues around this "mini project".

The end of this week we have a cluster meeting in Bolton which will be very interesting, this will be a one day event with a focus on the use of technology to support CDD - including what I am hoping will be useful discussions and demonstrations around using Wookies, Widgets and using XCRI. I am sure this will result in another blog post!

Learning to stretch – becoming flexible

This weeks interviews have been very useful in understanding how we need to learn to be flexible, where we need to bend to make CDD easier.

• Communication – we need to be flexible on how we communicate both internally and externally. We can’t assume that because we know something everyone else knows it too. This has been raised a number of times this week as an issue, “information may already be out there but I don’t know where it is without help.” and “I try and get information but can sometimes feel like I know less now than I did before”. Examples include, knowing about our QIS website, knowing changes have been made to processes and supporting documents, knowing where documents are stored, knowing the right person to talk to and having the same language. All big things that need to be considered.

 

• External delivery – we need to trust those in our organisation who are putting forward external staff to deliver content onsite either at partner colleges or employer sites. We need to be flexible with our assumptions about employer delivery of awards. By being flexible enough to move away from “standard delivery” we can ensure that we have the same standards applied across the board, if it is good for us it is good for them. We can give clear ownership of processes and decisions so that we can find out (and communicate) why things have happened and how we can change them.

Barriers to being flexible – Myth or Reality?

As we have spent time talking to different faculties and services it is interesting that we each have our own perceptions of reality. During a recent interview it was noted that as a university we did not encourage cross faculty working, that our processes were not flexible enough to share funding for example. This was then discussed in another interview where the person mentioned that the university did have processes that allowed for sharing funding. What is the reality? It appears to be both are, depending on your own experiences and point of view. As Mark Stiles says “often the perception shapes the reality”, can we turn this around?

One member of staff (lets call them A) was able to achieve the “miracle” of cross faculty funding by looking at things from a different angle, another (B) tried to get the same result using the traditional point of view and was unsuccessful. At the moment there is no way of telling B about this way of working, or thinking. As Enable moves forward we will be able to share the experiences and the processes from staff member A and give them to staff member B to help change their reality. This is a fairly simplistic view that breaks down as we get into perceptions on what is responsiveness. Depending on who we have spoken to some staff members believe that for an employer lead award a years turnaround from design to delivery is perfectly reasonable, other staff (and employers) however find this an extremely long time to wait to train staff. Staff often say that validation takes too long, but investigation has shown the processes are very responsive, it is the information that takes time, along with organising meetings with relevant staff and employers (where needed). There is a recognition that as a HE organisation we are often obsessed with having meetings when it would be possible to discuss things either via email or online tools such as GoogleDocs or OfficeLive. A lot of the problems around these perceptions are based on changing peoples behaviours, supporting them using new technologies and providing tools to help reduce the amount of input they need to do into forms required for the CDD process.  This is the next 6 months of Enable, as we put together a “to be” model of the university, and plan the stages around how we get there. Along with this we will be implementing some prototypes, focused on supporting our quality service with external examiners.

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.

Measuring the costs and benefits

The project is working hard at planning for managing course information with regards to the work of the Quality Review Process. As part of this I have been reviewing and attempting to write scenarios based on some of the issues around the Quality Review. This has been much harder than I expected using TOGAF and required me to look at a number of samples online to help me. This will not be a quick solution, however there is real value in doing this, and I am considering writing one for Enable itself. This could be a very useful communication tool to use with the executive. This is important as I try and get them to understand the benefits to an Enterprise Programme Office and how it will save money for the university. It seems as though the message is being lost somewhere at the moment. As part of this is the issue around the SMWG and the fact that it hasn't been able to meet recently. There was one scheduled for today but this has been cancelled, although the project team is meeting with the executive sponsor for the project and the Business Re-Engineering Manager for the university.

We have had some interesting interviews and informal conversations this week around managing course information, one discussion was focused on how accessibility could be embedded into course design rather than bolted on as part of induction or ignored completely. This was an interesting point, and one that was particular to that stakeholder, which reflects back to last weeks workshop about different views by different people.

We have also met with one of the faculties to talk to them about issues they have with CDD, and with the Quality Review team. This meeting was valuable in that it gave us a real insight in how to market content to the executive, but also about what the executive expect from projects running under their view. We are now writing a mini PID for this so we can communicate some of the outputs of the work we are doing and how it all fits together to create a bigger plan for the university whilst still giving them some quick wins

Using TOGAF

This week has been a planning week, with looking at the issues raised, and putting a plan of recommendations together for the SMWG. This document is designed to support how the programme office will work, and the work we are doing with EA and TOGAF.

As part of the work of Enable we are now talking to our Quality office around how they see the information used to support curriculum design being better utilised. This has had us discussing the issues found during the Quality Review (as well as those from interviews with Enable) and some ideal solutions to these issues using supporting technology. We will be following TOGAF for this information and are using our initial meetings to complete the “vision” stage. Sam is using the TOGAF guidelines to create scenarios from these meetings as part of it.

Next week is a heavy one from the perspective of EA as both Sam and I will be attending the next FSD meeting in London which is followed by an EA day. We then have an Architecture Elluminate session scheduled for the Wednesday afternoon. All EA hands on deck! I have installed BizzDesign on my little laptop which could also be quite interesting!

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.

Partnership Meetings

I attended a recent SURF meeting at Staffordshire University that discusses the development of Fd's. This was a very informative meeting, as issues raised were clearly linked to work being under taken by Enable. The main conversations were around a new review of products for our partnerships which Enable will be assisting in, UCAS course data and issues with systems.
The group discussed UCAS course data and how it is handled between colleges and the university, and who should be supplying the information to UCAS. This is something that had not been discussed with Enable, but as we start looking at course information it is an important part to consider, and if the process changes, or should each college be handled the same way?
As part of the discussions around system issues from this meeting we had a get together with a member of staff from faculty to talk about their experiences of using university systems to support non traditional courses. This was an interesting discussion that showed that sometimes we, as a university, move faster than our learners, and that some processes need to be more flexible with the ability to support non-technical approaches, including e-enrolment, and that we should be encouraging the use of plain English for anything learners are involved in rather than assuming a level of literacy that they may not have not just for handbooks but also for the their online experiences. At the same time as this the partner colleges also reported issues with assumed learner access to technology, which can impact on learners being able to access systems once they attend lectures. Hopefully with the input of partner colleges we will be able to resolve this and other issues. Which links nicely to our next stage of the project which is where we look at issues raised and how they can be addressed and piloting some changes.

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.

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.

Themes and Issues

We have got together as a team to go through the different initiatives against the 5 themes that were created at the start of the project, and we noticed something very interesting. In each case although there would be one main theme highlighted by the initiative team, the initiative would often fit into three or more of the themes highlighted, that may not have been recognised by the initiative team . Is this due to the closed nature of the initiatives themselves and how we as a university manage them? We also realised that there were clearly two different types of themes emerging the first around the Curriculum Design and Development, the other change management. As each initiative was highlighted we were able to see 9 emerging change management themes, including issues around breadth and depth, stakeholder engagement, and silos. A full break down on themes and how they fit with the initiatives will be made available once the initial process mapping stage is complete.

Processes and Management

After a number of posts last week I have been very quiet this week due to attending a number of meetings on process mapping and also continuing my training on Leadership and Management. This week has highlighted a number of issues with processes that exsist within the university where they are implemented against non traditional, flexible award development. We have spoken to 4 faculties and found that the same issues keep reoccurring around document management and resource allocation. I have also attended a college HE Forum to present the Enable project, the first time without a PowerPoint presentation! It all appeared to go well and I got some interesting notes out of it - and they are already joining our Validation Support Network so that is brilliant.

We were going to have a meeting with Gill Howland today but that has been cancelled but we have put a document together to support the presentation that I did last week to the SMWG that also links to the training I am doing which is handy! We have also looked at the themes that were mentioned during the project bid (and the project plan) and have mapped a number of initiatives to the different themes, we did discover that with our holistic overview that they had impact on themes that the initiatives had not acknowledged. We also looked at themes we could create linked to issues around change management. I am now off to a Quality Review meeting to see how that fits with the Enable project. April will be a quiet month for blogging for Enable as there is a fair bit of holiday and me attending conferences, so don't be disappointed if you don't hear from me as much!

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.

University view

This week I have attended a number of meetings around work being done in the unversity around looking at our provision of product available to our partner colleges and their learners. This has included being able to be part of two working groups, one on looking at 2 year, part time, Foundation degrees and another on looking at how we support progression onto degree level awards. This has highlighted the fact that the university already validates different deliveries of Foundation degrees beyond those that sit within the standard university calendar, and that there is some need to think of standard frameworks that faculties can use to help designing an award, although these frameworks may differ based on the subject area being taught (such as education - where the work based learning aspect has to fit with the colleges calendar).
I have spoken a bit on my own blog about my thoughts on how the university is handling strategic management, so I wont go into it here. I will simply say that I am now working on a short presentation for the senior management working group on the 17th to raise this with the executive.
We have started having meetings with regards to mapping the processes, however most of these wont be happening until towards the end of the month, which means that we might be a bit late on the mapping for JISC, although the information we already have can be used to create the first draft of the evaluation plan and the "final" project plan.

Critical friend visit

We had a successful critical friend visit with Tony where I gave the first version of the new partner presentation I did, to give him an idea of how the partners fit in with the project. We also gave Tony a break down of the Hub / Spoke / Theme idea for the project and discussed some of the issues that the project is unearthing including identity/ role management, funding devolved faculties, work planning and managing the development of new product. Tony stated that some(or all) these problems exist within most institutions, and it is how we handle solving them that will be interesting. The fact that we have had initiatives that keep bringing up the same issues means that we need to sit down and think about how we solve them. As part of the visit we have given Tony viewing access to the Live Office environment, where we are holding our draft project documentation and have invited him to one of our SMWG meetings (see when the next one is yourselves with the calendar on the right).
Sam spoke about the work he was doing with the process mapping and the standards that we are going with and how they are converging. Hopefully when his thoughts are more clear there will be more about that on this site. Jenny gave Tony a quick view of what one of the initiatives was up to - DIVAS (blog links on the right) and we spoke for some time about the validation process, the perspectives of partner colleges about the experience and supporting those participating in it.
This week has also seen me writting a chapter overview on Work Based Learning and thinking about writing an abstract for ALT-C 2009 on this project and managing change. Next week I am attending a number of WBL and product design related meetings along with some more initiative interviews so a busy week. Have a good weekend!