Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #8

At the start of the week I spent time developing the first draft of the Digital Strategy presentation.  Very much a preliminary draft and work in progress and is expected to provide the basis for further iterations and improvements in both content and presentation.  There are a number of supporting documents and collateral which I have used which will be made available as part of this work package.

I attended the second of two research focus groups.  During the session I made a couple of contributions about looking forward into future digital research requirements, and also protecting existing research assets.  I provided team with a summary of the digital gaps, opportunities, threats and capabilities as I perceived them after the meeting.  I think that this model can work quite well but I am going to have to work harder to get people to use this model during the next period of consultation.  Will need to think about how to really engage the digital research agenda if this is going to be a priority (which I feel it should be).

In my catch up meeting with the technical services team, we discussed a number of pieces of work that will be progressing as a matter of priority.  I was pleased that there had been consultation within his team and names had been allocated – these activities are not big enough to warrant any project overhead, but I am keen that they progress and are monitored pro-actively.

I had useful separate catch ups to keep in touch about VLE related and exit handover activity.  I have picked up a request to draft a paper about the non-teaching VLE plan as we migrate from the WOLF system and will pick that up next week.

One thing that I haven’t done well is keep the contract Project Managers informed about what I am doing generally, and that is a gap as they are potentially a little out of the day-to-day loop and potentially with much to offer.  I am going to try and get us all together and provide a briefing and chance to exchange thoughts.

My final meeting of the week was about asset management There are new posts being advertised on the internal University vacancy pages relating to this work.  This is part of a package of dozen or so posts which were mentioned and I wonder whether it might be useful to alert the DAS team to the customer facing roles already recruited, the roles that are actively in progress and those that will follow shortly.  It's another good news story for DAS.