Communication Strategy

Today marks the start for my team and I working on the new CiCS 3 year communication strategy 2010 - 2013 at the University of Sheffield.

The strategy will cover both internal and external communication and rather than write it in isolation we are holding small discussion groups with staff in the department to gather their views and input.

In order to get representation from across the whole of the department we have worked to a 25% representation rate across all teams. This has resulted in approximately 50 people taking part in the discussions and as we have tried to keep groups small, over the next 2 weeks we will be facilitating 6 group discussions.

Each discussion group will be together for 90 minutes going through some structured areas to consider. In advance all attendees have been asked to consider the following

- What are the problems with communication in CiCS and what actions can you suggest to remedy them?

- Who is responsible for communication and how can we get students, staff & CiCS staff engaged in what we have to say?

- In three years time what might CiCS communication be like, in cultural and technological terms?

The sessions should be interesting, and hopefully provided us with a full range of issues to consider in our new communication strategy. The aim is to publish the strategy early 2010.

Virtual chat

Recently I attend a residential for a distance learning course I’m doing. Day to day the course is supported with a website, online lectures (audio/video as well as slides), resources to download and through a VLE (Moodle).

Everybody there commented how important these face-to-face sessions were, and many said how isolated they had begun to feel, particularly as posts to Moodle had dwindled to nothing in the weeks before the residential. Someone commented they had wondered at one point if anyone else was still doing the course, but that they didn’t feel they could just send an ‘anybody there’ post to Moodle. It made me wonder why, since social chat was the first thing people did when meeting face to face. Interestingly, after the residential there was also a brief flurry of 'chat' posts, before silence one again fell on Moodle.

I'm a very quiet person - always sat at the back of lectures and hoped not to be noticed - but other people on the course are much more outgoing, so I don't think personality explains the difficulties of keeping the site active. It is a fairly small group though, so perhaps there is a 'critical mass' required.

At the Innovation and Communication' event back in 2008, Oxford University showed how they had successfully used Facebook to support central and distributed IT Support Staff. However, they had a very large number of staff (around 600), and about 20% joined the Facebook group, and discussion was still relatively limited.

I wonder what you would regard as successful for this kind of group? Given that they use very few resources to maintain, is any discussion a win, even if it is very sporadic, or should we be putting more effort in to promoting their use?

EDUCAUSE

I've just returned from the Educause 2009 conference in Denver, Colorado.  I'll blog about some of the sessions I attended elsewhere, but I wanted to highlight in this post a couple of things which Educause (the organisation, not the conference) is doing on the topic of "communications".

The Educause Review magazine often has interesting and useful articles, and in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue there's an excellent article entitled "Good Communication: The Other Social Network for Successful IT Organizations" by Lisa Trubitt and Jeff Overholtzer.  I think this paper captures rather well both the relationship management and the information dissemination aspects of IT services' communications agenda, and certainly is well worth reading - particularly if you need to persuade your IT department's senior management of the value and importance of these activities!

Educause have an ITCOMM  Constituent Group, rather like UCISA's own Communications Group.  They have a mailing list, a wiki, and a number of resources (mainly presentation slides) built up over the last couple of conferences.  They did have a group meeting in Denver, which I (alas) did not hear about until too late.  The meeting notes point to some interesting and relevant material.

Of course, the US environment is different from the UK environment.  One of the main differences is the size of the UK community (very much smaller than the US) and another is the scale of institutional resources available (US institutions are in general much richer thanks to the generosity of their alumni).  Nevertheless, there are significant similarities, and we can both learn from and contribute to the US community.

We do of course have our own wiki and mailing list - please use  tham!

Presentations with Prezi

A few weeks ago I started tinkering with a piece of software called Prezi which is available free (you can also upgrade at a cost), and is a tool to create presentations.

I was looking to create a way of pulling all the presentations together for the CiCS Departmental meeting.

I did find it frustrating at times, but after a few hours I had actually produced something I was reasonably happy with which can be seen here. The compromise was that it didn't encompass the presentations people were making except for a hyperlink - however time didn't allow me to look at moving other peoples presentations into Prezi.

In the end I chose not to use this at the departmental meeting as there was a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, however its an interesting way of producing presentations once you get your head round it.

A number of other people within the University have started to use Prezi, another example of a presentation using it can be seen here.

Over time we will look and see if we will use Prezi, it does however provide an interesting alternative to PowerPoint (for now).

Video meetings

We had a really productive group meeting at the end of last week, especially rewarding because we did it via video-conferencing: with the four of us who could attend hailing from Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds and Sheffield, it meant we could achieve in two hours what would have taken at least three of us a complete day (and more) if we'd gone for a face-to-face meeting at one of our institutions. Three institutions would also of course have had to pay out for traveliing expenses and another for a buffet lunch, so in these hard times video meetings are also very cost-effective. Whilst we do recognise the social value of meeting up in person every so often (which we tend to do at events anyway), using video means we can of course 'meet' more frequently. The only negative in my view is the slight time delay you get when someone speaks, so frequently you find that two or people end up speaking at the same time - not a big enough negative in my view to outweight the advantages and in fact this can be quite amusing when it happens. Our next meeting will be in December - via video.

Strategic Liaison at the University Of Sheffield

Over the last year in CiCS (Corporate Information & Computing Services) at the University of Sheffield we have been working to improve liaison with the rest of the University to improve our services.

The change of the University structure to faculties allowed us to build a more effective model for introducing Strategic Liaison, which started earlier this year.

We spoke with each academic faculty to gain agreement on implementing Strategic Liaison including defining its content to ensure it didn't end up duplicating the role of operational liaison.  

There was flexibility in terms of membership and numbers, with each faculty being asked to decide their own strategic representatives for the faculty.  For CiCS membership has been approximately 5 people predominantly members of the CiCS Executive.  For Faculties the membership has ranged from 5 to 15 representatives.

We decided to implement a structured agenda to provide some consistency across all the strategic liaison meetings, the structure fitted in with the  headings from our service catalogue (Learning & Teaching, Research, Communication & Collaboration, Help & Support, Infrastructure and Corporate Business Activity).

The meetings have been highly successful and we have recently received agreement from the Registrar to implement Strategic Liaison with Professional Services.

Customer Liaison presentations

Following on from the success of the "Customer Liaison - a standard framework for HE" event at LSE on April 22nd we would like to invite you all to contribute to this liaison blog. We want to keep sharing good practice, ideas and issues and will be a first step towards potentially developing a dedicated liaison community within UK-HE.

In order to start contributing you will need to have a blogger account, if you don't already one you can easily and quickly create one by visiting https://www.blogger.com/start

Once you have an account please email your blogger username to Chris Adie (C.J.Adie@ED.ac.uk ) or Sue Cunningham (S.m.cunningham@leeds.ac.uk
so the correct privileges can be set for you to start writing in the blog.

Liaison or Relationship Management?

When we talk about ‘liaison’ do we really mean ‘relationship management’? It’s a question that’s been on my mind for some time now as I think it does help if those of us who think we are doing pretty much the same job have got a common vocabulary that we can refer to – and maybe decide we are not doing the same job after all!

I’ve found a definition on the web that says that Liaison is “communication or cooperation between people or organizations”. That seems a fairly basic definition and I think that’s probably where we all start off. In our case here at Cardiff we began by identifying a key person in each academic School and making sure that person had relevant information from us that they were then expected to pass on to their users. Over time, we in Information Services appointed liaison officers (that we call ‘consultants’) so that these key people in Schools would themselves have a named key person at our end. The relationships between the two began with a getting-to-know you period, consisting of informal meetings and some exchange of information. Almost inevitably incidents have arisen over time and enhancement requests have been made that the consultants have been able to resolve or action. In addition, we have been keen to involve the School contacts – whom we call Local Computing Representatives, or LCRs – in new projects, seeking their input wherever we can so they get a sense of ownership of the services that we provide. Consequently the relationships have matured to encompass a degree of mutual trust and a genuine sense that we are working in partnership with each other. Of course there are hiccups – we can’t please everyone all the time and there are times when the relationships are tested. It’s my view however that we have moved on beyond that simple definition of ‘liaison’ above, and are now well on the way to ‘relationship management’, a belief that I think is borne out by the following description of RM that I found on the OGC website (http://www.ogc.gov.uk/User_roles_in_the_toolkit_relationship_manager.asp):

The main functional responsibilities of the relationship manager are:
* encourage an atmosphere of trust, openness and communication and an attitude based on working together and shared objectives
* proactively look for ways to improve the relationship wherever possible
* ensure that all stakeholders in the arrangement feel that they are involved, that their views are important and that they are acted upon
* establish and manage a communication framework and ensure that it is used effectively
* establish and manage communication flows between customer and provider, and ensure that they are used
* ensure that communications at all levels are peer-to-peer
* manage the dispute resolution process
* resolve 'soft' tensions between customer and provider, that is, situations where tension is felt or perceived but no formal issue has yet arisen
* 'manage upwards' to ensure that senior management are informed about issues before they escalate, and can intervene as appropriate
* establish regular reporting procedures, both formal and informal, and ensure that they are used
* organise forums, working groups, seminars, roadshows, training sessions, and other information-sharing activities involving staff from both the customer and the provider side
promote understanding of each other's business practices and common techniques
* It is vital that the relationship manager has the authority to make or suggest changes to the arrangement - working practices, communication flows, the contract itself - to ensure that the relationship is safeguarded.

I can honestly say that at Cardiff we do all the above, although not all with 100% effectiveness so we still have some work to do and more progress to be made – and I think the above actually serves as a pretty good checklist for us to do that, and indeed for anyone who is unsure of how they can move on from whatever stage of liaison/relationship management they happen to be at.

Using Appreciative Inquiry in a Liaison Context

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a half-day "IT Strategy Summit", involving around 35 people from the College of Science & Engineering and from Information Services. On the College side there were a number of senior academic staff who are on the College's IT Committee, and a number of IT managers from the Schools within the College. The IS side included relevant Division Directors and Section Heads.

The objectives of this meeting included developing mutual understanding of College requirements and priorities for IT services, and providing an opportunity for informal contact between key IT-related senior staff in College and IS. Quite a lot of thought and preparation went into this meeting, and I decided to use Appreciative Inquiry to structure the discussions.

Appreciative Inquiry (which I've used on several occasions now) was developed at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s, and has been demonstrated to be a very powerful technique for organisational renewal and development. It is founded on the premise that "organizations move towards what they study". Thus when groups study problems and conflict, they often find that the number and severity of complex and problematic issues grows. When groups study what is good about the way things are, these aspects tend to flourish and grow. AI therefore focuses on the best of an organisation – its positive core.

There are four stages in AI practice: Discover, Dream, Design and Deliver (or "Destiny"). In the summit meeting I used the first three only:

1. Discover what works well. This phase focuses on discovering and appreciating "the best of what is". We do this using unconditionally positive questions. What works well within an organisation? What examples are there of exceptional accomplishment? What made them so successful?
2. Dream an ideal future. This phase calls on us to imagine an inspiring future which embodies our wishes, hopes and dreams. What is our potential as an organisation? What and where do we strive to be?
3. Design a way forward. This phase identifies the actions and processes which lead from where we are now (building on "the best of what is") towards our ideal future. We continue to imagine ourselves in that future, but turn and look back to see how we got there.

In AI, problems and conflict are not ignored, but are set aside until the Dream phase, when they are treated as a desire for "something different", to be worked into the positive vision of an ideal future.

After presentations from the Head of College and Head of IS, the summit was structured as a number of parallel group discussions. Each group was provided with a list of "appreciative questions", covering the three phases, and was invited to record their answers on the flipcharts. There was a "reporting back" session, where groups reported their thinking to the entire meeting.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how things went. The atmosphere was refreshingly positive (which was of course the intention), and there was significant development of mutual understanding.

Some people were complimentary, even enthusiastic, about the AI approach. One or two were frustrated: "the format did not give us an opportunity to discuss the barriers to greater cooperation". I was not altogether surprised. In academic research work (particularly in the Sciences), the focus is very often on identifying and solving difficult problems. AI requires us to take a completely different approach, where problems and barriers are re-framed in terms which encourage rather than inhibit progress. It is a different way of thinking and feeling about the world, which you may find challenging if you are used to problem-oriented thinking!

I strongly recommend AI as a technique in liaison contexts. If you try it out, let me know in the comments how you get on!

Improving clarity of communication within the team

Clarity is an important factor in communication, within my team the internal communication is a huge factor of success, do people know what is expected of them, by when, why and how?

For a long time now as part of regular meetings with my individual team members I have taken notes of what has been agreed in terms of objectives and actions etc (hopefully tied back to our operational plan), typed these up in word and emailed them to the individual as a record of what was discussed and agreed.

This can be time consuming, however, in terms of people knowing what is expected of them it is a worthwhile exercise.  As well as there being an amount of effort on my behalf what was happening was team members were then taking the document I had sent them and then duplicating all their actions in their own to do list.

In a bid to become more efficient with communicating actions we have started dabbling with technology to provide a solution.  Some team members were already managing their to do lists electronically with software such a Omnifocus or Remember the milk, these packages allow tasks to be added in a number of ways, one of which is by an email.

So now I can type up a list of actions for a member of staff and when I send an email it automatically populates their to do list.  This means less duplication and less chance of actions being missed as they weren't transfered across.

Its still early days and we are assessing the success of this, and also looking at its use in a wider context.  

Surely good communication has to start within your own team and with many solutions being free its got to be worth giving it a go.

Sharing resources

Many years ago the Support Services Group (then TLIG) set up an IT document sharing archive. Basically it allowed people to provide a list of links to online documents they were happy to share. For various reasons, the archive wasn't maintained and died several years ago.

Brian Kelly (UKOLN) set up a simple Google-based search for a few of the original sites. And we have been asked to investigate if the community would find a more comprehensive resource useful.

I think there are a number of questions we need to answer before we start.

What is a document? Or is 'document' an old-fashioned word, and not really relevant. The document sharing archive did share documents, most of which were originally paper-based. Perhaps now we should be talking about resources - online documents, FAQs, YouTube videos etc?

What can we share? Here at Leeds, in 2000, we had a comprehensive set of in-house documents covering most of the applications on our desktop. However, since then we've bought Watsonia's Engine Room, so many of our new documents are site-licenced and can only be made available within the University. I wondered how many other institutions are in a similar position. And of course, even with in-house documents you may not want to freely share them.

Finally, we don't want to re-invent the wheel. Is there already somewhere to share IT resources? Let us know.

Making use of Twitter

Within CiCS at the University of Sheffield we currently maintain a service status web page to let all our users know if any of our IT services are unavailable, at risk or back available following an incident.  We have manually populated this information covering core hours between 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday. 

Over the last few months we have been working on automating the web page to be populated from our helpdesk software, and following successful testing this is set to go live in the next few weeks.

As part of trying to improve the service and provide information on issues with key services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week we started looking at technology to allow easy population of our service status page during out of hours periods without needing a member of staff to have access to the helpdesk software or content management system and hopefully without the need to have access to a computer.

It was felt that a great way to update the information would be something similar to Twitter, accessible via a mobile phone, and so we started to investigate what opportunities were available to us.

We now have created and are testing a system where an incident manager can access a password protected webpage via a mobile phone and populate the fields relating to an incident with our services.  This information is then submitted direct to our helpdesk software and the correct fields are populated and in turn the service status web page is also updated.

Following on from this however was our investigations into Twitter itself, we have now created a Twitter account for CiCS that is automatically populated by our helpdesk software in the same way that our service status webpage is.  Along with this information we have also started to Twitter out our CiCS news which is also currently a web page detailing all the developments and achievements of the department which will impact on our services.

As yet we haven’t promoted CiCS Twitter as we want to test the process out thoroughly first, however we already have a number of University staff who have found the twitter and are following it.

Customer liaison - the need for partnership

In many Universities, certain academic departments employ their own local IT staff in addition to the central IT service. A perennial issue the need for good engagement between local IT staff and central IT staff.

I have found that department-based computing staff are increasingly keen to enable their user community to leverage centrally-provided services, since this reduces duplication and frees local IT staff time to focus on discipline-specific needs. Why run a your own server if you can use someone else's?

For everyone to be comfortable with changing from a locally-provided service (perhaps tailored to local requirements), to a central service (which may be less specialised), there has to be a clear understanding of the local needs, and of the nature of the service which is being provided centrally. For instance, what levels of reliability and performance are really required? What levels are being aspired to and achieved centrally?

But beyond this, there's a need for good engagement at a personal level between local and central support staff. A level of mutual trust needs to be built up, so that local IT staff can be confident that particular local requirements will be looked at sympathetically, while central service staff need to know that departments will be reasonable in their expectations. Having this level of trust makes it much easier for all the stakeholders to engage in guiding the ongoing development of the service. In other words, what's needed is partnership.

I think the Managed Desktop service at the University of Edinburgh is a good example of partnership. There is considerable bilateral communication between central and local staff through a range of mechanisims, including workshops and informal lunch meetings as well as mailing lists, a wiki, and of course individual email and telephone contact. Everyone has a say in shaping the service as it continues to evolve. The result is a good level of mutual understanding and trust among stakeholders, without which the Managed Desktop would not have been nearly so successful.

There are many things which can get in the way of good partnership. Sometimes things become too adversarial, or the tone of communication is inappropriate, or (more simply) pressure of work means that personal interaction drops down the priority list.

The challenge for liaison staff is to foster an improved sense of partnership between local and central services.

Communicating away from the office

With all the current bad weather it highlights some of the issues around communication that you take for granted when you make it into the office and so do all your staff.

Whilst less than 50% of my team have been able to make it into work today (including myself) it doesn't mean that we aren't working and it definitely doesn't mean we aren't still communicating.

Some months ago we produced a web page which aimed to help all members of staff at the University of Sheffield be able to work effectively off campus which you can view by clicking here. 

One great tool introduced by CICS is myChat which is an authenticated instant messenger tool for all University staff to use.  Using this technology has a number of advantages over other channels available such as email or phones.   Firstly it allows me to see who is actually logged into the system and available,  all my team log into the system when they start work wherever they are and so I don't need to ring round to everyone to find out if they have managed to get to work, if they are coming in etc.  

Secondly its a really quick and easy way of keeping in touch, its not as formal or intrusive as a phone call or email, and responses are a lot quicker.  Files and links can be shared and you can even have a conference chat with all or a number of the team joining in.

This type of technology has its place and with all communication one solution doesn't fit all situations, however on a day like today I am glad to have such a tool at my disposal.

YouthMedia

Youth Media recently sent round a demo of a widget which sits on the desktop, letting you deliver news (and adverts) with various other bits of functionality. We were looking at it because contacting all students, to let them know about planned service interruptions, changes to opening hours, etc, is one of the things we struggle with. It doesn't seem to matter how many notices you put up or how eye catching you try to make them. We have plasma display screens around campus, but one student at a focus group commented that because they were bright and glossy she assumed they were just adverts and ignored them. We have logon notices, which are plain and simple,  but I think a lot of people just click 'Finish' without giving them a second glance (including me, especially when there has been a spate of them).
 
I guess the problem is we are trying to communicate information people don't really want to know. They might need to know it, but that's not nearly as interesting. I don't think there is a simple answer. I certainly don't think there is any one communication channel that will miraculously get through to everyone. (Of course, if you know what that miraculous method is, please share!) So perhaps plugging away using every channel available is the way to go.  After all, once you have the message, adding it to web pages, printing a few posters, etc, isn't particularly time consuming. Of course, getting the right message, in plain, non-technical English, is a different matter altogether...

Getting Started

Welcome to the Communications Group blog. As a communications group we thought it was about time (possibly way past time!) that we set up our own blog.

Let’s get all acronyms out the way first:

UCISA – University and Colleges Information Systems Association

SSG – Support Services Group (the group formerly known as TLIG, a sub-group of UCISA)

CG – Communications Group, us (a sub-group of the SSG)

One of the main reasons we’ve never set up a blog before is lack of time. Everyone on the committee has a ‘day job’ in HE, and our Support Services work inevitably takes a back seat. The second reason I think is that if you’ve never written a blog before, writing in an informal style seems a bit strange and daunting. So, if you’ve any tips for making integrating blog writing in to everyday life, let us know.

Sue Cunningham