Although it is a week since the last message, I have
only been in the office for three days. Most of you may not be aware that
I am on a part-time contract, so I am in the office on a pattern which remains
flexible and is now loaded into my Outlook Calendar up until Christmas.
I will also be setting out of office messages so you know where I am,
although I am happy to be contacted at any time via email. I have found
it easy to set up the mobile working environment on smartphone and tablet which
was intuitive and effective – and this is also a good point to highly commend
my experience of eduroam Wi-Fi which appears to work seamlessly across all the
places I have visited so far. In my opinion, this is a great piece of
work from the teams who have put the infrastructure together.
On Tuesday, James and I visited Burton where part of
the School of Health is located, teaching about 300 nurses and midwives and
aligned with the local hospital next door. We were very grateful to
Claire for the guided tour. The building is an integrated teaching,
learning and academic office space which had a mixture of lecture rooms,
computer teaching rooms, library and social space. It’s not the funkiest
space in any of the campus buildings visited so far, but is doing a great job
for the next generation of health professionals. The key takeaways were
the various operational practices in a smaller branch location, the remote
support requirements for IT, AV, network etc and the enthusiasm of the local
team currently supported by DAS teams from other locations. We also
visited the other Library on site which is an NHS facility very close by and it
took a while before we realised and were kindly pointed in the right direction
– the big Library sign on the side of that building was a distraction.
Somewhat bizarrely, given the hospital so close by, car parking for the
building was not a problem, but we had already tried and failed to park in the
Hospital and Visitor car park which were full!
Last week, there were several finance meetings which I
attended. On Wednesday it was monthly budget meeting followed by the
Agresso Board. It was very useful to get an impression of how these
processes operate. There were some discussions at the budget meeting
about how the budget is currently profiled and a concept called “amortisation”
which may take a bit of getting to grips with. By the end of the first
quarter, the budget position becomes a little clearer and budget holders are
currently working on the impact of currency changes on the forecast which could
be significant for DAS as some important services are procured in dollar/euro
and there are potential increases in the pipeline due to Brexit. The
Agresso Board covered both Finance and HR activity, included updates on the
imminent system upgrade (to a new version called Milestone 5) and it was good to
see an hour of the meeting spent on the 12-18 month future development
plan. This was in Gantt Chart format grouped by areas of system
functionality. The importance of user input was demonstrated by Andrea
Pumford’s membership of the Board representing the Agresso User Group, and
among other things Andrea provided really useful views on areas such as system
training and prioritising new activity. We also learned from the
highlight report about the input from IT infrastructure teams supporting the
upgrade to a new storage platform, an emerging project to digitise staff HR
records (which would have significant storage implications), new payment card
terminals being rolled out (with support from Max on connectivity). We also
learned that there have been upgrades to the student system (SITS) which caused
overnight data transfers to stop working to specification – it was suggested
that this may have been the result of incomplete interface testing.
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