Fourth Newsletter to IT Services

Staff Culture Survey

The results of the first survey are now available and have been stored on H Drive (Exchange/IT Services Consultation/Connect Survey/). The individual reports for each of the teams that comprise IT services can be found in this folder. Thank you to everyone that took part - over two thirds of us completed the survey which is a good return. There is feedback for every team except the Systems Team where there were not enough total responses to run the report and this is also a small team. Please take a look at this information and let me have your thoughts and reflections on the survey conclusions. The second survey will follow shortly.

Change Management Programme
This programme has been initiated as a result of recommendations in the MIS Department review conducted during the first half of 2008. The scope of the change management programme has (by agreement) been extended to include the new IT Services Division of Learner Support Services which incorporates the MIS Department. A project mandate has been developed and approved and will be overseen by a Change Management Board sponsored by Prof. Jeff Lucas. You can find the documents at H:/Exchange/ProjectManagement/Projects/IT Services Change Management/. This process will be transparent and all of the documents will be posted into this area. Rather than "push" this information out to everyone we will presume that you will "pull" the documents and information from this folder. The process has already started with all three consultants now working on the various aspects that they will assist with (they are Peter Bollands, Jermyn Consulting and Robina Chatham). The key objectives of this change management programme are as follows:

. Managing the implementation of recommendations established in the MIS Department Review during 2008
. Clarify University vision and objectives in terms of the new IT Service – how it should underpin the University, Academic School and Corporate Service Objectives.
. Interim budget and systems planning process for 2009/10
. Identification of potential ‘quick wins’ which will allow customers to experience positive changes from an early stage. This should encourage customers, and increase their support for the overall exercise.
. Early confirmation of a (potentially) revised structure for the IT Services department and appointments to the senior posts in that structure.
. A service catalogue which will enable the IT Services to be defined in terminology that its customers can understand. Ultimately this will lead to service ownership, service level definitions and related activity (a best practice approach to service management – framework ITIL)
. Specific resources to help with management development and individual coaching of the management team.

Office Space Consultation - a reminder

Estates and Facilities have been working on various potential plans for the JBP Building 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). After a month we haven't had any further input so the deadline for this opportunity is now Friday December 12th.

Review of student PC cluster provision

Within the document there is mention of a review of student cluster provision. We visited every cluster room supported by IT services during this month with representatives from the Student Union Sabattical team to do a condition survey. The detailed verbatim comments and scores provide an insight into what our student customers think about our current facilities in this building and in the other parts of the campus. There is also a document prepared earlier this year on PC cluster usage and observations that was presented to the e-strategy board. This can be found in the same location as the space consultation survey.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued. We have discussed the recent meetings and service priorities with corporate services directorates and this was presented and approved (with some further additions) at last week's meeting of the Corporate Services Exec. We are now a good way through meetings with academic schools to pull together a companion document which will also prioritise this activity. We have discussed an E-strategy "program management" role, and Russell Allen has agreed to take on this responsibility in the New Year adopting the new guidelines from Jo Hills who was appointed to the Project and Programmes role within the Strategic Planning Office. We have also reviewed the Educause student evaluation of IT on campus http://www.educause.edu/studentguide/873?time=1226909532 and believe that this would be a useful way to take forward the promotion of student facing IT services to prospective (and current) student. 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 - Furniture condition survey

Some funds have been set aside to replace funriture (desks and chairs) in a number of offices where we have health and safety issues identified by a recent condition survey by Wendy Wrigglesworth who is the LSS health and safety rep. We are also going to replace broken and worn out chairs in student clusters and put some decent furnniture into the group study rooms that will be re-commissioned in the New Year. If you have any specific requests for furniture that have not already been identified then please inform your line manager - there is a weekly meeting of the IT Heads on Thursday's at 14:00 and we will review the requests this week to forward to the preferrred suppliers for pricing.

Some other bits of news in the last month

Tanks to Jamie Ansell and colleagues in Estates, the plasma screen at the School of Health reception has been ordered after a long delay (not a technical delay) and should be in place for the New Year.

Thanks to Mark Jones, new data storage capacity was added which has relieved problems in various Schools including Management and Health.

A small team has been working hard on the SAINT system hardware upgrades which is a very significant change to both the hardware and software configuration to improve performance and resilience. This will be happening during the at risk period in December.

Sun microsytems have approached us with a view to publicising the great work that has been taking place with Computer Aided Assessment and the new facility that will be opening shortly in F Floor Richmond building using Sunray thin client technology. Sara and team have done a great job with this project which has been recognised as a national exemplar and will bring great credit to the University as the first installation of its kind in the UK.