Back in January, the Continuous Improvement (CI) service formally launched following its approval as a dedicated University resource.
Since then, there has been a lot of change; the Secretary & Registrar’s Directorate merged into Finance and Planning, and Business Improvement Services, where the CI service originated from, has recently become Strategic Portfolio & Business Change.
Throughout this change, the service has continued to develop, extending the reach of its service delivery across the University and linking in with other HEIs and organisations to share best practice.
In January, the CI team helped form the Lean in HE North & Midlands group and attended the inaugural meeting hosted by the University of Sheffield, which included CI representatives from De Montfort, University of Nottingham, York St. Johns, Leeds Beckett and Leicester. Since then the team has attended two seminars, hosted by Leeds Beckett and Nottingham, and we will be hosting the next event at SHU in November.
The team has started to link in with non-HEI’s and will be working alongside Primetals Technologies, British Steel and Fives Group to investigate the possibility of creating a network of CI experts in South Yorkshire across all industries.
CI has also been working with the Students’ Union and designed a two-part, bespoke training package to support the Students Union in delivering their 2020 strategy and streamline their processes and systems to offer better value to students and make it easier for them to access their services.
There is a consistent demand for support from the team, with an average of 6 requests per month. The types of initiatives that the team get involved with range from one-off process review workshops through to service design and delivery.
The four-part modular CI training course continues to prove very popular and spaces usually book very quickly, in fact the team had to squeeze in an extra cohort this year to meet the demand for places. At present 80 people have completed the full training course, 61 people are mid-way through the course and 23 people are due to start on Cohort 8 beginning in September. If you are interested in attending CI training, the team have recently released two new cohorts which can be booked through Core. Cohort 9 starts on 7 December and Cohort 10 starts on 28 February 2018.
If you would like to know more about the CI Service, you can email them on ! Continuous Improvement, or follow their CI Yammer page for regular updates.