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.
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