On 26 September, the University Leadership Team met for an awayday at Whirlowbrook Hall.

This was an opportunity to step away from day to day business, and reflect on how the strategy implementation is going.

In the morning we had a very useful workshop session. For each of the 4 Pillars, we identified the main projects and shared what was going well and what was not going so well. For the ones where we had less confidence, we divided these into things that could / should be addressed within the Pillars (eg Financing the Masterplan needs to be addressed by Estates and Finance under BaGU) and areas where support from across the University was required (eg dealing with short term estates issues before the Masterplan is implemented). Because ULT members generally only have knowledge of the one or two Pillars that they work in, this was really helpful in developing a shared understanding of progress and issues.

In the afternoon,  Jo Solecki and Claire Boot (SPABC) joined us to give us a programme management overview, and then I ran a  session talking about ideas for the planning process for 18/19. We also started to think about how we structure ourselves to deliver strategy in future – whilst it’s  been convenient to have a short term project fund separately identified for a couple of years, this is not sustainable, and so in future we will need to think about how strategic initiatives are delivered across the University alongside business as usual.

We finished the day with some reflective thoughts about how ULT works as a group, how we make the most of ULT meetings, and the forward plan for meetings.

Thanks to Jo and Claire and their team, Tom Russell, Philippa Robinson and Emma Scoffield who all put a lot of effort into making sure that the programme overview session had complete and up to date information.

Deborah.