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!