Thursday 25 February 2010

And we are nearly there...

With the feedback on the JISC Self-analysis framework assessment report received from our Project Director, we focused mainly on 3 activities: re-writing parts of the report and clarifying some additional details, trying our skills in process mapping activities and arranging a feedback session workshop for our stakeholders. All of the 3 activities proved to be quite straight forward although as expected the process mapping was a bit tricky. The main reason being that the processes that we looked at were outside of our department and getting the detailed information to produce an ‘As Is’ version was quite challenging. In the end we did manage to produce a process map for ‘New Enquiry’ process of our Knowledge Exchange department in both, ‘As Is’ and ‘As Should Be’ versions, but it did not look like a valuable way to spend the time as that was not the purpose of the project.

We have also organised all the administrative side of the CaRM Project Feedback Session which we are going to hold in March. We have invited all of our stakeholders and individuals who expressed interest in our project during the past 6 months and we are hoping that it would be useful for them to hear about what we have been up to.

Another interesting event is planned for the next week as we are holding a Skype conference call with our collaborative presentations group. We are looking forward to hearing more about other projects and to find out if their results were much different to ours.

Monday 8 February 2010

Progress report

And yes, there is some progress to speak about! We have finally managed to put together all of our data collected from the User Requirement Survey (URS) and Baseline Assessment , analyse it and produce several interesting reports – URS analysis and CRM and the HE sector. We have also spent a lot of time going through the CRM Self-analysis framework and critically assessing to what extent we have used it during the project and what could be added to improve the framework. All of the reports still need a little bit of work but after they are finalised, we will focus on compiling the reports into the template distributed by the JISC and produce the draft project report.

In addition today we received several documented processes from our colleagues in the Knowledge Exchange department from which we are hoping to do some process mapping in the next week or so. We have also received an email from Sharon regarding the collaborative presentations – we were partnered with the projects from the universities of Salford, Loughborough and Roehampton. So if anyone from there is reading this – we will be in touch soon!