One of the most important events in the past few weeks was our visit to Manchester to attend the Employer Engagement dissemination event held by the University of Salford (UoS). Although we had quite high expectations going to this event, UoS managed to meet them in full. It was very encouraging to see that it is possible for an institution to improve its focus on the Employer Engagement and actually receive very positive results. It was also an excellent opportunity to meet other institutions interested in the same topic as us.
In regards to our project – the User Requirement Survey is now out and we are collecting the results. Although the Survey has been up for a week and a half, so far we have only 21 respondents, therefore we are considering other ways of distributing the survey and encouraging people to fill it in.
We have now completed a draft of the Customer Satisfaction Survey. After consulting with our Business Analyst we are now presenting the survey to the Business School Communication Department, as it was them who proposed assisting us with facilitating and distributing the Survey. This meeting should take place on Wednesday but I am already very excited about it!
Tomorrow I am going to Birmingham to attend the Modelling Workshop. This should be quite useful as I don’t know much about process mapping...
Monday 7 December 2009
Friday 20 November 2009
Project Update
Friday is definitely the best time to blog, especially as the last week was packed with events and experience!
Vicky and I had a very useful phone conversation with Philip Holifield and Ann Wardley from the UCLAN Partner View project. It was very interesting to find out about another approach to somewhat similar project and exchange opinions and ideas. We have picked up several interesting suggestions from the conversation and it was nice to speak with a ‘fellow’ project.
We have also hosted a CRM Networking Event for our colleagues this week. The event was a success! We had excellent attendance and interest to the event and all our guests were very open, positive and pro-active! The discussion regarding CRM was going so actively that the only thing that stopped us was the end of the time slot we booked the room for! We have already received a lot of positive feedback about the event and we are already planning the next one.
There was a lot of interesting discussion going on but we were particularly excited about 3 topics:
1) We have had a confirmation that one of the senior managers of the University is interested in implementing a successful CRM system;
2) A representative from the PR & Marketing department has volunteered to do some CRM promotion on our behalf;
3) We were offered some help in the development of a Customer Satisfaction Survey, which we are hoping to focus in the nearest future.
I will post an update once we have any more development in one of those areas.
Vicky and I had a very useful phone conversation with Philip Holifield and Ann Wardley from the UCLAN Partner View project. It was very interesting to find out about another approach to somewhat similar project and exchange opinions and ideas. We have picked up several interesting suggestions from the conversation and it was nice to speak with a ‘fellow’ project.
We have also hosted a CRM Networking Event for our colleagues this week. The event was a success! We had excellent attendance and interest to the event and all our guests were very open, positive and pro-active! The discussion regarding CRM was going so actively that the only thing that stopped us was the end of the time slot we booked the room for! We have already received a lot of positive feedback about the event and we are already planning the next one.
There was a lot of interesting discussion going on but we were particularly excited about 3 topics:
1) We have had a confirmation that one of the senior managers of the University is interested in implementing a successful CRM system;
2) A representative from the PR & Marketing department has volunteered to do some CRM promotion on our behalf;
3) We were offered some help in the development of a Customer Satisfaction Survey, which we are hoping to focus in the nearest future.
I will post an update once we have any more development in one of those areas.
Friday 6 November 2009
User Requirement Survey
I don’t even know where to start – so many things to write about!
First of all – finally, ‘it’ is ready! It took us some time to identify what information we were hoping to get from our CRM User Requirement Survey and even more time to produce the questions matching our aims and objectives. Endless hours of deliberation produced 17 more or less balanced questions, which were piloted among a few of our colleagues. The feedback we collected was so useful that nearly all the questions were altered slightly, producing a final version of the survey. If you are interested, please follow the link below to see what the survey looks like. You can input data into the survey as this copy is specifically prepared for dissemination and will not affect our internal data collection.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=D_2bUQWfdiv8z7Dq6GL7yRJA_3d_3d
We are going to launch the survey on the 18th of November, during our CRM Networking Event (formally known as CRM Workshop) that we are hosting for stakeholders. The preparation for the event is well on its way and we have managed to identify some new stakeholders, which is always very useful. The event has attracted a lot of attention and we already have more attendees than initially anticipated.
In addition, I am now attending a Staff Development course on SPSS which we are hoping to use for the analysis of the User Requirement Survey. SPSS seems to be quite complicated software, but still, even for basic statistical analysis, it seems to be much better than Excel.
Finally, we have just submitted the JISC RM Progress Report survey. Our main thought on this was that the survey was well constructed and helped us to reflect on some of our project activities. Especially challenging but interesting was the question about additional opportunities for CRM benefits.
First of all – finally, ‘it’ is ready! It took us some time to identify what information we were hoping to get from our CRM User Requirement Survey and even more time to produce the questions matching our aims and objectives. Endless hours of deliberation produced 17 more or less balanced questions, which were piloted among a few of our colleagues. The feedback we collected was so useful that nearly all the questions were altered slightly, producing a final version of the survey. If you are interested, please follow the link below to see what the survey looks like. You can input data into the survey as this copy is specifically prepared for dissemination and will not affect our internal data collection.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=D_2bUQWfdiv8z7Dq6GL7yRJA_3d_3d
We are going to launch the survey on the 18th of November, during our CRM Networking Event (formally known as CRM Workshop) that we are hosting for stakeholders. The preparation for the event is well on its way and we have managed to identify some new stakeholders, which is always very useful. The event has attracted a lot of attention and we already have more attendees than initially anticipated.
In addition, I am now attending a Staff Development course on SPSS which we are hoping to use for the analysis of the User Requirement Survey. SPSS seems to be quite complicated software, but still, even for basic statistical analysis, it seems to be much better than Excel.
Finally, we have just submitted the JISC RM Progress Report survey. Our main thought on this was that the survey was well constructed and helped us to reflect on some of our project activities. Especially challenging but interesting was the question about additional opportunities for CRM benefits.
Tuesday 27 October 2009
First Results
Last week we shared our preliminary baseline assessment findings with one of our key stakeholders who is also the director of a major Business Development Unit (BDU) within the institution. We were not expecting to see any impact from this report so quickly, but it seems like CRM is gaining support and interest is snowballing!
An email circulated yesterday across several other BDUs raised the importance of CRM and requested people use the CRM system for recording their BCE activities in the future. This has already resulted in enquiries regarding CRM system training and licence purchasing. A combination of awareness raising and support from management seems to have caused a major shift from months of discussing and debating CRM to proactive engagement.
In addition, we are going ahead with an initial idea sparked by our conversation with Sharon to host a networking workshop for our colleagues within the institution in order to raise the awareness of CRM. Has anyone done anything similar? Could you possibly advise us on anything you have found useful when hosting/promoting such an event? For example, how to raise interest in the event, especially with academic colleagues?
An email circulated yesterday across several other BDUs raised the importance of CRM and requested people use the CRM system for recording their BCE activities in the future. This has already resulted in enquiries regarding CRM system training and licence purchasing. A combination of awareness raising and support from management seems to have caused a major shift from months of discussing and debating CRM to proactive engagement.
In addition, we are going ahead with an initial idea sparked by our conversation with Sharon to host a networking workshop for our colleagues within the institution in order to raise the awareness of CRM. Has anyone done anything similar? Could you possibly advise us on anything you have found useful when hosting/promoting such an event? For example, how to raise interest in the event, especially with academic colleagues?
Wednesday 21 October 2009
New Ways
It has been a very busy couple of weeks. Our first report should be available quite soon. In addition, we had a very useful telephone conference with Sharon Perry, who has kindly advised us among other things on a very good method of starting up our next Work Package.
In order to understand and develop the institution-wide requirements for CRM, we are now considering hosting a short event for our stakeholders on the topic of CRM. We intend to give short presentation about the project, but the main idea of the event will be more about bringing together colleagues from different departments who shares a common interest in CRM.
We are hoping that such an approach will help us to draft out the questions that we would like to include in our User Requirement Survey as well as to understand and establish contacts with new stakeholders and CRM champions outside the initially identified departments.
In order to understand and develop the institution-wide requirements for CRM, we are now considering hosting a short event for our stakeholders on the topic of CRM. We intend to give short presentation about the project, but the main idea of the event will be more about bringing together colleagues from different departments who shares a common interest in CRM.
We are hoping that such an approach will help us to draft out the questions that we would like to include in our User Requirement Survey as well as to understand and establish contacts with new stakeholders and CRM champions outside the initially identified departments.
Wednesday 7 October 2009
First steps
To begin with, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Vladimir Kislicins and I started with the University of Hull as a CaRM Project Officer at the end of August, 2009.
Although it is still early days, there already are some results we can share. First of all, we have developed a website dedicated to the project which is accessible through the following link:
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/ACS/information_management/carm_project.aspx
We will use the website for posting documents of our findings and overall progress. We have already developed a detailed project plan which is accessible for everyone to see via the website. There is also a link to the report on the first part of our Work Package 2 which is not active at the moment, but should be uploaded within the next week, after the report is finalised.
We will continue to update our blog as we reach some interesting results or significant problems. Feel free to check our website to view the project plan and other files that we would like to share.
It would be also very interesting to hear how other projects out there are doing as it has been some time since there were any updates!
Tuesday 21 July 2009
On your marks...get set...go!!
I've just had my first conversation with Sharon and I am feeling much more reassured. There seems to be a lot of support available for the CaRM projects and I am looking forward to the set up meeting in Birmingham next week. So, I've completed my first task...set up a blog. I just need to complete the project plan now!
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