The difficult third newsletter

They always say that the third newsletter is always the hardest (it’s a bit like that difficult third album) so here goes with Newsletter number 3.

The end of the first ninety days (and the start of the second ninety days)

I’ve nearly completed all of the one-to-one meetings – and I want to thank you for sharing your experience, knowledge and ideas. It has helped me get a much better understanding of how things work and how we rely so much on teams rather than individuals. I’ve written up all the notes and while some of the things we talked about have been followed up already there are some things that will take longer. Fortunately I didn’t end up with a long list of actions from every meeting! When the process is complete I will share a brief unattributed summary of the main conclusions. As you know I am also meeting with customers and this is something that will continue rather than be a one-off exercise. A few of us have spent time visiting the various Directorates in Corporate Services in this period and we have now assembled a tracker which sets out all of the things that we heard in those sessions to help us identify the priorities of this group of our customers for the coming year. This has been a big undertaking and I would like to thank Sara E, Geoff, Sara M and Philip for their input to this process. The latest version of this document is attached to this newsletter – feedback and comments welcome please.

Staff Culture Survey

I’ve been thinking in these first few months about whether it would be useful to have a “baseline” of the current way we do things round here (culture). The one-to-one meetings are potentially impressionistic and inconsistent and not a good basis for feeding back the current perceptions of the various individuals that make up the IT service.

Rick Graves told me about a piece of work he did a little while ago for an external company in the area of surveying individuals about how connected we feel to (a) the job, (b) the managers, (c) the University (organisation) and (d) our progress. A second survey covers the dependencies between teams and how they work together. The organisation that commissioned and used this work has 20+ years experience in this field.

We had a discussion about this at our weekly Heads of Service meeting (we are now meeting each week at 14:00 on Thursdays) and agreed to do both these exercises, inviting all in IT Services to participate. The mechanism is nice and simple – we all get to answer about 20 questions and this is in the body of an HTML email which is then sent back to an administrator role (Rick) fully encrypted, anonymised before loading into the sausage machine that produces the final reports. Rick assures that it is fully secure and protected – only Rick would know who had submitted to the survey but no-one including Rick would know what responses we had individually given. A pilot is currently happening within the MIS team and then the first survey will be sent out. We will all receive a copy of the output. To avoid survey fatigue the second survey will follow later. Please can I urge you to take part as the more of us that take part the better the information it will provide.

Successful Meeting Maker Upgrade and launch of Notify Link

This month there has been a major upgrade to the meeting maker service which most of us will not have noticed as it happened over a weekend. This provides a number of improvements to the way you can access diaries with a web browser (including drag and drop!) and also enables a new way of synchronizing mobile devices with calendars to be launched which has a number of great benefits – in terms of data security as well as ease of use. It also means that the opportunity has been taken to tidy up and archive older calendars to improve system integrity and performance. I would like to thank Mark Jones for the planning and preparations that were needed to make this upgrade a success and John Fairhall for the related work that is going on with Notify Link.

Office Space Consultation

Estates and Facilities have been working on various potential plans for the JBPBuilding and Communal Building refurbishments. We agreed to provide an initial space requirement for this purpose which was sent out before the October reading week/half term as a draft for further consultation. The document can be found at H:/Exchange/IT Services Consultation/ We discussed this at IT Board and it was suggested that the easiest way for everyone to contribute to this consultation would be to use comments and the track changes features in word. So please take a look at the document add your comments, make any changes and please save it as a new version (by incrementing the version number by 1). Within this document there is mention of a review of student cluster provision. We are going to visit every cluster room supported by IT services later this month with representatives from the Student Union Sabattical team to do a condition survey. It will be interesting to see what our student customers think about our current facilities in this building and in the other parts of the campus. This will be added to the documentation.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued. In the last few weeks we have talked about a new hot topic which is centralized timetabling, shared services (I attended a shared services conference at Loughborough this month www.share-he.org), updating of various web policies relating to information access and security (with thanks to Jacqui Cuthbert for all the assistance) and some interesting research that Rae has been pursuing into “Groupware” collaborative software solutions (which includes Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint). There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

IT Services - Office Relocations Completed

Everyone from Richmond Building arrived as planned in the last month so we are all located together for the first time. This has been a major upheaval and everyone is settling in – thank you for making everyone welcome. In addition, the ICT Support and Servicedesk teams have been very busy dealing with the knock on effects as staff in the VCs Office, PVCs office, Marketing and Corporate Communications have all moved around into new space or into the offices that were once occupied by the MIS Team. This has all gone very smoothly and on recent visits we have been complimented on the smooth way that phones, PCs and other equipment were transferred.

Some other bits of news in the last month

We have been pursuing a solution for “free” wireless access for guests, visitors and potentially the general public and it looks like there may be some interesting solutions that have emerged. More investigations taking place but hopefully this new service will be available in the New Year.

The plasma screens and LED worms are fully operational again in the atrium landmarks – and they are being run using Sunray technology which is low power and high availability. Thanks to Jamie Ansell for his perseverance on this long-running job and seeing it through to completion (until someone decides to move them again!)

We have been assisting with the set up of the new International Office that has been established in Dubai. In addition, there have been new developments to provide overseas recruiting agents with on-line web access through the e-vision system. This has already been rolled out to 4 agents and is getting positive feedback.

We entertained some visitors from the University of West Bohemia who were on a study tour investigating how UK Universities manage information and system security. They were on their way between Warwick and Edinburgh so enjoyed their visit to Bradford.