Author: Professor Mark Spearing, Vice-President (Research & Enterprise)
This meeting was our monthly outing in our guise as the ’10-Year Plan Board’.
The meeting started by welcoming Richard Middleton. Richard will commence as our interim Chief Operating Officer from 1 January 2020.
We followed with a discussion of the situation regarding the current University and College Union (UCU) industrial action. Several members of UEB have had conversations with colleagues who are taking part in picketing activities over the past week. We heard that workload and issues of casualisation were key areas of concern here at Southampton. These interactions with our colleagues who are on strike have been collegial and good-natured.
We then approved the minutes of the last two 10-Year Plan (10YP) meetings.
We received an update from the Change Portfolio Manager on the overall programme progress. She noted the report on the monitoring and assurance processes being applied to ensure that programmes are progressing and delivering the intended institutional improvements. We believe that we are succeeding in maintaining an appropriate balance between achieving adequate monitoring and assurance, without being overly bureaucratic. There was a discussion regarding a proposed upgrade for Blackboard, the University’s virtual learning environment, which was recognised to be time-critical. Brief updates were provided on several other early-stage projects, for purposes of clarification, including ‘Digital X’ – the programme to develop digital content across most of the University’s educational programmes.
The 10YP budget was reviewed and we concluded that our expenditure rate is consistent with plans for the current year. Plans for future years will be firmed-up as the year progresses to allow for more accurate forecasting, including estates and IT projects in the medium-to-longer term.
We considered a paper proposing a revised approach to governance of the 10YP, with a particular focus on the prioritisation process for projects entering the 10YP portfolio. There was agreement that, in addition to affecting the ’levers’ of the strategy, it was important to consider the opportunities to affect positively the experience of staff at our University, including around issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. Conversely, we reminded ourselves of the importance of considering and managing the impact of change programmes on people, particularly in cases where groups of individuals simultaneously experience, or are asked to deliver, multiple change programmes.
There was agreement that projects that were part of the 10YP should be transformational, aligned with strategy and have benefits to be realised more widely across the University, and certainly beyond individual faculties or professional services.
The plan is that in future, while continuing to meet monthly, the 10YP board will meet twice a year for the focused purpose of considering which projects to advance through the key project gateways. This should help with our prioritisation between the very diverse projects in the portfolio. A subset of UEB will meet more regularly to ensure that the projects and programmes being considered for decision are sufficiently well aligned and well evidenced.
We received a verbal update on the progress on the improvement of the Chemistry teaching labs. The main external building infrastructure has progressed well. There are some problems with the internal fit-out, which are having a negative impact on adjacent research laboratories. These issues are receiving appropriate enhanced attention from the project management team and the estates programme board.
UEB received updates on two important student-related projects: the Year One Transition Project and the Enhancing Academic Support Project:
- The aim of the Year One Transition Project is to ensure that all students become part of our learning community as quickly and fully as possible. Pilot activities have been run with the Business School, Maths and Health Sciences. The project is proceeding well. There is a key need to ensure that the project outcomes are delivered in a sustainable way, and that they are embedded across our University.
- The Enhancing Academic Support Project is at an early stage; evidence is being gathered and focus groups formed. Initial proposals are being developed and consulted with the stakeholder groups. A key emerging theme is the importance for our students of the feeling that staff care about their learning and their experience. There is also a crosscutting issue associated with the importance of providing a more uniform experience, and that our support mechanisms are consistent and connected across the University. Immediate next steps will be to develop proposals for action and creation of resources, as well as putting in place training and staff development activities.
Also for note, as an experiment, board papers were presented in a new format, using commercial software called ’Board Effect’. Members of UEB reported that this worked well, which means UEB can operate much more effectively and completely paperless.