Managing Change and Innovation

Flexible Service Delivery Event

This week has been a busy one, we spent the first two days down in London with the Flexible Service Delivery programme, the first day was catching up with projects and talking about the use of SOA, and other solutions to managing data.
The second was focused on modelling and using Enterprise Architecture. This was very useful for us, and in particular for me, as it highlighted a number of issues around governance and process ownership that is needed for the modelling to be successful. It was also interesting to see during the modelling exercise that everyone had their own perspectives to a similar process, depending on their experiences and knowledge.

UPDATE: Since this blog we have used ArchiMate and Enterprise Architecture extensively to support the work of Enable (see Enable: Using Archimate in the Enable Project), and have pushed the benefits of the approach to other projects including XCRi, Student Systems, Assessment and Feedback, and Partnerships. This approach is slowly being appreciated by all levels of management at Staffordshire University.
 
I have had my paper successfully accepted to the 8th International Conference on Education and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications: EISTA 2010, held in Florida in June – this is based on my document I wrote a while ago for the Senior Management Working Group on Programme Management, to fit with the presentation I gave them last year. I’m pretty excited about this, and looking forward to discussing the theories etc. As part of this I have submitted something similar for the Plymouth conference as a trial. It’s the first time for me presenting all on my own!

UPDATE: Read my experiences here about the EISTA conference, to read the paper I did please check out. The paper is now available "Corfield, FM, (2010) 'Supporting an Innovative Curriculum in a Traditional HE Environment. Developing a winning strategy to support change at Staffordshire University', Journal of Education, Informatics, and Cybernetics, Vol 2, No 3, 2010".

As I am becoming more and more focused on Portfolio Management /TOGAF it is clear that support from the whole of executive, along with clear governance and business strategy statements are needed. How ready are we for all this? At the moment I would have to say not very, however with the work of the project and by constant communication with staff, this will change over the next year.

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.

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.

Notes from the Leeds Cluster Meeting

Just back from another useful cluster meeting, this time at Leeds.

It’s becoming apparent that there’s a lot of closely-related work going on in other JISC programmes and the curriculum design work will benefit from our participation in these other programmes. Specifically, we’ll be participating in the Flexible Service Delivery programme’s Strategic Technologies Group (STG), a community exploring and using enterprise architecture, and we’re running the OpenStaffs project in the JISC OER programme.

I now understand coaching as distinct from mentoring and tutoring. The PC3 coaching approach seems ideally suited to work-based learning. The kind of skills the coaching approach would develop would be a big selling point for employers.

From a support point of view, so far we’ve had lots of meetings to discuss the ideas, concepts and problems and theoretical approaches and solutions. We’ve got to the stage now where we need real world examples and advice from people/organisations who have ‘done it’ and lived to tell the tale. Input from outside the sector would be refreshing.

Costing new approaches was a major topic of discussion. This is also a main area of interest for the STG. I’m looking forward to finding out more about approaches to costing in the enterprise architecture sphere.

A key risk for our enterprise architecture effort was reiterated at the meeting – scope creep. We need to keep a very tight reign on architecture scope and partitioning to ensure the work fits the resource available.

One of the benefits of our enterprise architecture will be the ability to explicitly communicate how the University goes about its business. Currently, a large part of the organisation has a folklore-oriented architecture. Business processes seem to be passed down in oral tradition from one generation of administrators to the next. To get anything achieved you find the go-to person for that domain and ask them what to do. Processes are not documented and are therefore harder to identify and communicate. Enable gives us an opportunity to paint a picture of how we currently operate, making it easier to spot problems.

Now it’s nose to the grindstone to produce outputs and outcomes we can discuss at the next cluster meeting.