The Building a Great University update from the June 2017 Leadership Bulletin

Building a great university – Richard Calvert

Work on the Professional Service Operating Model (PSOM) is now well underway, and at our second meeting of the Great University Board we reviewed and approved the programme mandate, as well as talking about how we ensure strong engagement with staff, both professional service and academic, as we go through Phase 1 between now and mid-July. The new web pages are a part of this, and you should be seeing and hearing much more from the team over the coming weeks. Our main focus at this stage is to agree the principles which will guide the new model – such as a strong user focus, and more consistency across the University – and also to assess our current ways of working in relation to these. This will help us to see what’s working well, and what needs to change.

Alongside the PSOM, we’re also focussing on our plans for the estate, and for systems and IT. Mark’s update at the start of this bulletin gives a summary of what’s happening on the estate. On IT and systems, Leon Etherington presented a roadmap for our technology and systems investment, which was endorsed by the Board. We’ve already made good progress in establishing a solid IT platform, and the current upgrade to Office 365, as well as work on the data centre strategy behind this, are further steps to reinforce this. Where we want to invest more over the coming period is in the quality and join-up of the systems which run on the platform, and this is where we want students and staff to see the most progress over the next 3-5 years.

The Board also had a first round of discussion on the People Plan, on which there will be more to come in future updates, as well as an update on how we take forward the equalities agenda.