Despite my best intentions, listed below in the previous blog, it's been a summer of mixed fortunes. We've got some new support in the Employer Engagement team, and crucially, a new Head of Employer Engagement joining us in about six week's time. These are roles I'd hoped to have in place at the project start but for various reasons (staff turnover, recruitment delays) we're only now getting to the level of resource originally planned. So progress has been slow, although we've had some very useful meetings with employers and other universities. I also travelled to Vietnam last month as part of a British Council funded event, to look at best practise in student employability and related issues. I was able to talk about our internships projects and it was fascinating to hear about local engagement with SMEs and placement processes in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
Our new Head of Employer Engagement, Richard Mendez, joins us from Leicester University and will take a lead role alongside me on our Transformations project. With this in mind, we're pushing some of our timelines out from autumn this year into spring 2013 so that we get the benefit of Richard's contacts and experience into the project. With quite a few business engagement and employer engagement initiatives firing up, I'm looking forward to the next six months and some real progress on the systems side.
Thursday 27 September 2012
Sunday 15 July 2012
Action learning at KCL
Thanks to Lindsay for hosting a slightly depleted action learning set at Kings College London on the 10th July. It was good to meet a few more of the individuals involved in our Transformations strand. Sarah facilitated and Lindsay, Lucy (UCLAN), Claire (Cranfield) and I shared some of the issues (and highlights) of our various projects. The 'action learning' ethos worked well and made for a more interactive and flowing session than our 'virtual' experiences to date. I suspect future virtual sessions will be more productive now we've actually met - perhaps for future programmes the first meeting of an action learning set should be the one where participants actually get together?
I took away a much better understanding of the others' projects, and a few specific actions:
1. Get to grips with the JISC resources we're using in the Keele project and start making better use of them
2. Update the project case study and keep it up to date
3. Do some more work on the evaluation spreadsheet and load it up to the cluster wiki
4. Keep blogging!
One other outcome from the day. Keele has just won further JISC funding under the Transformation programme to develop a virtual student advisor (SAM). From chatting to Lucy at the meeting, it was apparent that UCLAN's TISSUE project is operating in very similar territory (but using a different approach) so I've pointed one of the SAM team at Lucy so the two projects can compare notes.
I took away a much better understanding of the others' projects, and a few specific actions:
1. Get to grips with the JISC resources we're using in the Keele project and start making better use of them
2. Update the project case study and keep it up to date
3. Do some more work on the evaluation spreadsheet and load it up to the cluster wiki
4. Keep blogging!
One other outcome from the day. Keele has just won further JISC funding under the Transformation programme to develop a virtual student advisor (SAM). From chatting to Lucy at the meeting, it was apparent that UCLAN's TISSUE project is operating in very similar territory (but using a different approach) so I've pointed one of the SAM team at Lucy so the two projects can compare notes.
Monday 9 July 2012
Action learning tomorrow - face-to-face
Off to Kings College London tomorrow for the first face-to-face action learning group. We've already had a couple of action learning sessions via Blackboard Collaborate but it will good to put faces to names. Virtual meetings are very effective, but my experience of action learning is that there are lots of non-verbal cues which make a big difference to how the session flows. The timing of this particular meeting, at around the mid-point of the project, is particularly useful - I'm looking forward to sharing some of the challenges and issues we're working around (plus the good stuff as well of course). A few things I'll be hoping to hear others' experience of: project staff turnover; ever-changing priorities; parallel institutional initiatives.
Progress update
The essence of the Keele Transformations project is to explore better ways of promoting and establishing placement opportunities with external organisations...
The past couple of months have seen some shifts in the time line for the project, as we take advantage of related initiatives and garner project-related information from them. As a key focal point of our analysis of placements activity and information requirements, our Destination Green project is coming into its own. This is a HEIF-funded Keele pilot for an internship+voucher offer for larger companies and is proving a useful test-bed for our systems analysis. The project includes user workshops which we're targeting as part of the Transformations project to get feedback and debate from participants - drawn from companies, Keele's Schools and the interns (graduates) themselves. We'll still be working in the information we're gleaning from the constituent parties individually, but the workshops are a great opportunity to get the different perspectives on information needs aired and shared. We'll then test our findings on SME companies, charities and public sector organisations who have taken placements from us in the past.
The CRM system used elsewhere in Keele that we're hoping to plug into is still a work-in-progress (i.e. we're not on it yet) but a new and welcome development is the introduction of Qlikview at Keele. We haven't started testing its capabilities wrt the Transformations project yet but it may prove a useful route to test-bed the type of dashboard view we're hoping to develop by the end of the project.
The past couple of months have seen some shifts in the time line for the project, as we take advantage of related initiatives and garner project-related information from them. As a key focal point of our analysis of placements activity and information requirements, our Destination Green project is coming into its own. This is a HEIF-funded Keele pilot for an internship+voucher offer for larger companies and is proving a useful test-bed for our systems analysis. The project includes user workshops which we're targeting as part of the Transformations project to get feedback and debate from participants - drawn from companies, Keele's Schools and the interns (graduates) themselves. We'll still be working in the information we're gleaning from the constituent parties individually, but the workshops are a great opportunity to get the different perspectives on information needs aired and shared. We'll then test our findings on SME companies, charities and public sector organisations who have taken placements from us in the past.
The CRM system used elsewhere in Keele that we're hoping to plug into is still a work-in-progress (i.e. we're not on it yet) but a new and welcome development is the introduction of Qlikview at Keele. We haven't started testing its capabilities wrt the Transformations project yet but it may prove a useful route to test-bed the type of dashboard view we're hoping to develop by the end of the project.
EA and Archimate
Having missed the EA workshop earlier in the year, I made it to the second one in London last week. It was a very useful session, with overviews of Enterprise Architecture and Archimate/Archi as a tool for modelling at an enterprise level. Some useful views from the coalface as well, particularly Lucy Nelson's overview of the EA space at UCLAN. The afternoon included some hands-on experience with Archi which I now need to translate into a Keele model to help illuminate the Keele transformations project - of which more shortly...
Sunday 29 April 2012
Action Learning set tomorrow
I've just (belatedly) caught up with the other project blogs and it's fascinating to see the progress being made and hurdles met/overcome across the various projects.
Tomorrow is our second action learning group: I'd tend to agree with Lucy's comment posted after the first one that it was a 'getting to know you' session rather than Action Learning per se. It certainly wasn't entirely the process that I'm more used to of guiding people to finding their own solutions to problems and issues. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the second session tomorrow and receiving lots of helpful guidance - I certainly need it at this stage in the project!
In terms of the Keele project, I mentioned in my previous post that we'd undergone a strategic planning exercise in the run up to Christmas. I'm still working through the strategic and operational plans of all academic departments (Research Institutes and Schools in Keele's parlance) and of the various administrative Directorates. These documents will help 'locate' placement activity, support and priorities. I still feel some way from understanding the wider placement picture across the institution and awareness of the JISC project does still need to be improved across Keele. For a variety of reasons the series of meetings with Schools and Directorates scheduled for the past six months have been more piecemeal and ad-hoc than I'd hoped, which is why I'm (still) working out a degree of rescheduling of some conversations and workshops.
The next major tranche of work after examining activity in Schools and Directorates is to speak to employers. These are conversations we're having with business and other external partners on a daily basis in the context of new initiatives, so again I'm rethinking our approach slightly so make sure we don't get 'employer fatigue'. The new Placements initiative I mentioned in a previous post is going great guns and will certainly give us some great feedback over the next couple of months. However, I haven't been able to get access to the new CRM system yet, so bringing that element in is still an outstanding action.
I heard a interesting analogy the other day, in the context of healthcare provision. There are numerous providers in the healthcare system, from primary to acute care, social services, charities, etc, etc, all of whom are pieces in a vast and complex jigsaw of provision. The problem in ensuring a coordinated and seamless service to patients at all stages is that all the pieces of the jigsaw are jumbled up and the picture on top of the jigsaw box is missing so no-one can see exactly how all the bits fit together. Worse than that, the individual pieces have been mis-cut, so that the bits that are supposed to interlock don't always fit together in the way that they should. A fairly jaundiced view perhaps, but I suspect some elements of this analogy do extend to any large and complex organisation that offers a user-centred service across a range of internal units. Which is why my revised Gantt chart and mind map of the placements project may have a few bits of jigsaw puzzle sketched in around the margins...
I was sorry to miss the Enterprise Architecture workshop in London (man-flu on the day) but the E3 benefits grid Lucy posted on her blog after the event looks useful - I'll try to use something similar to help clarify to internal audiences how the Keele placements project locates in the bigger institutional picture.
Tomorrow is our second action learning group: I'd tend to agree with Lucy's comment posted after the first one that it was a 'getting to know you' session rather than Action Learning per se. It certainly wasn't entirely the process that I'm more used to of guiding people to finding their own solutions to problems and issues. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the second session tomorrow and receiving lots of helpful guidance - I certainly need it at this stage in the project!
In terms of the Keele project, I mentioned in my previous post that we'd undergone a strategic planning exercise in the run up to Christmas. I'm still working through the strategic and operational plans of all academic departments (Research Institutes and Schools in Keele's parlance) and of the various administrative Directorates. These documents will help 'locate' placement activity, support and priorities. I still feel some way from understanding the wider placement picture across the institution and awareness of the JISC project does still need to be improved across Keele. For a variety of reasons the series of meetings with Schools and Directorates scheduled for the past six months have been more piecemeal and ad-hoc than I'd hoped, which is why I'm (still) working out a degree of rescheduling of some conversations and workshops.
The next major tranche of work after examining activity in Schools and Directorates is to speak to employers. These are conversations we're having with business and other external partners on a daily basis in the context of new initiatives, so again I'm rethinking our approach slightly so make sure we don't get 'employer fatigue'. The new Placements initiative I mentioned in a previous post is going great guns and will certainly give us some great feedback over the next couple of months. However, I haven't been able to get access to the new CRM system yet, so bringing that element in is still an outstanding action.
I heard a interesting analogy the other day, in the context of healthcare provision. There are numerous providers in the healthcare system, from primary to acute care, social services, charities, etc, etc, all of whom are pieces in a vast and complex jigsaw of provision. The problem in ensuring a coordinated and seamless service to patients at all stages is that all the pieces of the jigsaw are jumbled up and the picture on top of the jigsaw box is missing so no-one can see exactly how all the bits fit together. Worse than that, the individual pieces have been mis-cut, so that the bits that are supposed to interlock don't always fit together in the way that they should. A fairly jaundiced view perhaps, but I suspect some elements of this analogy do extend to any large and complex organisation that offers a user-centred service across a range of internal units. Which is why my revised Gantt chart and mind map of the placements project may have a few bits of jigsaw puzzle sketched in around the margins...
I was sorry to miss the Enterprise Architecture workshop in London (man-flu on the day) but the E3 benefits grid Lucy posted on her blog after the event looks useful - I'll try to use something similar to help clarify to internal audiences how the Keele placements project locates in the bigger institutional picture.
Tuesday 6 March 2012
Time flies...
Suddenly it's March and I'm embarrassed to realise that this is my first blog of the New Year. Not that nothing has happened in the past two months, more a case of juggling multiple facets of the project. I'm discovering more and more strands to placement/internship activity and emerging initiatives across Keele. One upshot of this is a need to revisit our original gannt chart of activity as I seek to avoid duplication of effort - heads of our academic units and others are currently the target for a number of fact-finding meetings across related agendas. Having three PVCs and a couple of Directors on board and interested in the project certainly helps with keeping the different strands joined up.
A major strategic planning exercise was also implemented in the run up to Christmas which has the benefit of enabling the project to feed into (and feed off) the plans of relevant functional units, both academic and administrative.
On top of that we've just launched a new internships initiative to put unemployed graduates into larger companies on 'green' projects. We have some great names signed up and are using the project to trial a new CRM system across our Employer Engagement team, our Science & Business Park and a key academic School. This will pilot some of the elements of improved systems that this project is looking at.
A major strategic planning exercise was also implemented in the run up to Christmas which has the benefit of enabling the project to feed into (and feed off) the plans of relevant functional units, both academic and administrative.
On top of that we've just launched a new internships initiative to put unemployed graduates into larger companies on 'green' projects. We have some great names signed up and are using the project to trial a new CRM system across our Employer Engagement team, our Science & Business Park and a key academic School. This will pilot some of the elements of improved systems that this project is looking at.
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