Friday 16 December 2011

Hello, is this thing on?

So, I've been running a blog for quite a while now but it's become a bit muddled with non-work content, so here's an attempt at two things:
  1. A dedicated place to post work-relevant content
  2. A fresh start at blogging my work experiences
My role has expanded considerably since I began blogging. My current role is basically a good excuse for lots of different things to be thrown in my direction including the management of project teams, writing bids for additional funding (JISC, essentially) and driving improvement in working practice amongst colleagues both local to my 'unit' and aspirationally, working in concert with other interested co-workers (see Danny and Alex's blogs for some excellent writing on this) to attempt to do some genuine joined up thinking within our section that, with hard work and a little luck will traverse across the professional services at our HE institution.

We've had a new Registrar start recently and the key message I've drawn from the comments he's made so far are that for professional services to thrive it must at least attempt to lead, that is pro-actively improve service, offerings such that the academic community sees us not 'just' as underpinning the core activity of the University (i.e. the dissemination and cultivation of knowledge) but as a key contributor to the innovation that drives us forward as a business entity.

That means that besides the SharePoint focused technical posts I'll be making, there will also be a raft of non-technical posts regarding technical team organisation, management and leadership; development methods and strategies (mainly Agile and its co-existence with PRINCE2 and more traditional waterfall style project management approaches); organisational change management (my core project work involves lots of this as it's encouraging to give up paper-based work methods in favour of role/task interfaces and electronic records); vision and strategy within HE, specifically within a technical professional service section and a plethora of other things that catch my eye. Not much then, really.

So, that's my 'content' goal and I'll also be trying to post a couple of times a month at a minimum. I hope someone somewhere find some of it something other than useless.

- rob

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