Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #16

One of the roles that I have picked up along the way is QA for the ServiceNow project so at is was month-end, I spent some time preparing a QA report.  This will be reported back through the Digital Campus Board which has been agreed as the current route.  I created a template as we didn't have one "in stock" and also passed on for future use.  Using a traffic light approach, there was plenty of green, a couple of amber and no red.

The Digital Advisory Boards continued with a very positive meeting involving our technology suppliers/partners. We have agreement to two further sessions this year in June and November and hosting/facilitation offered by partners including one in its London office where it has a customer experience space.  I also took up the offer of using the new cohort of student ambassadors and together with invites to student interns etc set up an initial session.  I am also in touch with Digital Marketing team about #packleaders (advertised on the foyer TV this week).

The Digital Strategy presentation is now in Spark format, and I used this for an extended "teaser" session with the DAS leadership team and with the Digital Advisory Boards.  It is ready to roll-out in this format to next week's Nexus sessions. These were advertised during the week and bookings are starting to come in.  Here is the link to the latest iteration: https://spark.adobe.com/page/xWWrBjaxMJrkE/.  I have also taken some detail out of this from the Powerpoint version to avoid overload.  Looking forward to some constructive feedback over the next week.  I had an hour's briefing from COLT who helped set me up Panopto and will be having a go at recording the Nexus sessions.

I met with colleagues about looking a little into expenditures - and we identified three work order "owners" to follow up with. So far I have spoken with one and we have the first candidate contract renewal already.  We are looking at what's coming up for renewal and whether we have recently negotiated.

During the Leadership Team meeting I made a note that the next submission of the risk register which is end March.  I subsequently provided some relevant material offering to facilitate a DAS workshop on this if its appropriate.  This is something I have done recently so this might be timely.

There were more Servicenow activities this week with discussions about asset management, and future workshops around the "top five" requests.  We were unable to combine the Servicenow visit on Wednesday to discuss as planned how we might proceed with "the art of the possible" discussions  - the HE lead turned back due to a major traffic incident.  I have arranged instead to see them in London next Wednesday morning for a couple of hours.

Thursday I met with Canvas project managers to bring them up to speed on where we have got to with (1) IT Strategy (the one pager) (2) the first phase of digital campus in the digital strategy document and (3) a roadmap I have begun working on with Technical Services.  This mainly covers Microsoft technologies which would form a range of potential solutions for the "none teaching" WOLF functions.  A very interesting few hours has left me more optimistic than I was, and that progress is going on "in the background" certainly in relation to building blocks.  More to follow on this one I am sure over the next week or two.

Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #15

Here is my usual round-up for the last week.

On return from BETT I spent some time preparing material for a feedback session including creating an Adobe Spark on-line document which is now updated here.  I have got onto the agenda at the beginning of the next round of "Tech Talks" and I have also circulated the material with the offer of attending team meetings to cascade.  I also prepared some materials for the Printer/MDF lessons learned workshop which took place on Tuesday.  There is a deadline of 5pm Friday for any other additions or corrections.  The session went well, in particular helpfully flushing out a range of outstanding actions.  These will be turned into an action plan with ownership and timeline.  I followed up about the lessons learned process for BI and have been unable to find anything so far.  Therefore I will set up another process in a similar format which will involve Directorate colleagues in the first instance.

Tuesday was the all-day ServiceNow workshop with two Fruition consultants and the DAS project team.  A really positive session - made easier by the amount of pre-work that had been undertaken.  My role was to primarily probe around the scope and understand the activities that need to be carried out in future phases - once we have replaced basic functions in the existing system which this workshop was primarily focused on.  We came away with a list of things in three broad categories which I will be writing up covering (1) Broader Directorate requirements beyond initial launch (2)  "the art of the possible" and (3) Things that need addressing which are not directly related to this project.  In a subsequent meeting I also agreed to take on a workstream relating to flushing out the top 5 requests which we will attempt to incorporate before July.  I can see that being a nice little challenge......

There was a bit of logistics this week setting up what are now going to be branded as relaunched Nexus Sessions week commencing February 13th.  There are now three sessions in diaries and we will be sending out invites and bookings via standard templates.  We will emphasise the chance to come to City Campus (and vice versa) and we are also setting up sessions in Telford and Walsall.

We made a reasonably good start with the Digital Advisory Boards this week, and there are 8 of our technology partners currently confirmed for next week's session.  There was another "scrum" meeting.  The "small successes" reported at the last two scrums have been fed into the Newsletter.