A Week On The Rails

It's been a busy week so far. I was in Leicester on Tuesday, a four and a half hour rail journey from Blackpool, though enlivened for a while as Chrissie Turkington from the JISC RSC Northwest walked past me on the platform at Preston so we spent ten minutes between Preston and Wigan, where she got off to continue to St Helens, catching up and swapping news.

I had another change at Birmingham New Street with its underground platforms - not the most pleasant of city stations, I always think.

Finally to Leicester where I joined a CAMEL workshop (Collaborative Approaches to Managing e-Learning) and joined in the conversations on communication with stakeholders, even being videoed playing the part of an Australian distant learner at one point, and ran the Change simulation, EduChallenge with them during the afternoon.

Then onto London, where yesterday I met with someone at Kings College London to discuss the sort of activities that a Centre of Expertise in Project Management might get involved with and how my organisation, JISC infoNet, might help support that with our online resources and participation in events.

Today I am feeding back on a project to a group of university and college IT Managers, who are meeting to discuss Business and Community Engagement and how IT might support that type of activity.

London is having what I'd call Blackpool weather - brilliant sunshine one minute then a monsoon and then back to sunshine!

I'm travelling back home tonight and tomorrow will be a well-earned day off!

Busy Week

After the flu it's back to work with a vengeance as I left the house on Monday and am not due back until Friday night.

I met up with Clive in Birmingham on Monday night to talk over our input to a project meeting on the following day. This seemed to go down well, the project was a JISC 4-year project looking at the process of designing the curriculum. One of the problems with such a project is in controlling the scope as just about every other process in an university either impacts on it or is impacted by it.

We introduced some Process Review techniques and some issues for Change Management and communications, given that for many stakeholders the implication that there could be changes to such a core process could be quite challenging.

Then it was off to Shrewsbury last night where we sat in front of a log fire that we tried hard to make roar... but we did get a whimper or two and briefly let out a cheer as a flame appeared for an instant!

We've spent today working on our own Business and Community Engagement related project and then headed north and we are currently in Ormskirk, prepared to deliver a Project Management workshop tomorrow. Then it's back down to Shrewsbury to end the week.

The voice is a little croaky after so much talking straight after the flu and a bottle of Buttercup Syrup has made the journey with me and been an essential if somewhat face pulling piece of equipment!

Glad we don't have a gig with the band this weekend...

Not sure the photo would stand enlarging - it was taken on my phone from the hotel window in Birmingham.

In Conference Mode

Before anyone comments I've gone quiet again, I must confess to being down in Birmingham at the 3-day Association of Colleges Conference.

Having sat through a number of ministerial sessions (stood through for one of them...) you could be forgiven for thinking that the conference theme was all about colleges engaging with business. It's an obvious priority at the moment and this is a good thing for me, because I'm currently project managing a JISC-funded project "Embedding BCE (Business & Community Engagement) through Business Process Improvement and Internal Engagement". A bit of a mouthful - so I'm calling it simply "Embedding BCE".

We're working with 5 institutional partners (UK colleges and universities) to find and highlight areas and examples of good practice and identify barriers and issues surrounding such work. It aims to help the 5 partners to identify ways improve their current business processes. It will give a picture of how well embedded BCE work is currently and produce online resources to help other institutions do the same for themselves.

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