Video Killed The Conference Star

It's been a busy old time recently. This last week saw a two day trip to Lincoln, coping with a hotel down a road that had been closed and a rather convoluted diversion, heavy sleet coming back around the Leeds/Bradford area which was also the site of a 50mph stretch of motorway equivalent to the distance between the borders of Scotland and Greece.

During this bit where the roadworks were only intermittantly in evidence, I was forced into the middle lane by traffic joining the motorway, where I was hassled by a maniac who thought it was a 55mph area and thought that one inch from my bumper was a safe distance. He was wanting me to pull into the left hand lane of course but it wasn't safe to do that - certainly not as safe as him pulling into the empty right hand lane would have been...

On Wednesday I spent 13 hours putting an audio commentary together and producing a short video to cover the fact I'd double-booked myself on Thursday. It took a long time but was actually really good fun to do and I must find the time to put the video up at YouTube sometime!

After that I had nine hours on trains on Thursday, going to London from Blackpool and then heading up to Glasgow following the conclusion of my business in the capital. On the way up to Scotland I spoke to the co-ordinator of the other event who told me the audio and particularly the video had gone down "a storm" and that people were wanting to be able to download it... Must have been better than me being in person by the sounds of it...!

Friday I ran a Project Management workshop in Glasgow and worked the video into it to see what would happen. People laughed in all the right places and there was a round of applause at the end that was very gratifying!

It's hand-held and horribly wobbly and the title reflects more the original conference subject than the video content. So for Change Management read Benefits Management.

So of course, it's been uploading whilst I wrote this, so have a look...

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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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