Embedding BCE

JISC infoNet is to follow up the work and outputs of the original Embedding BCE project with a new project.  Working with some of the original partners the new project will follow the implementation of improvements and developments that were identified as part of the 2008-09 project.

Using the JISCinfoNet-developed CAMEL model, the new project will allow partners to visit each partner institution to see at first hand the developments and progress.  The project case studies will highlight good practise and potential issues surrounding the financing, authorising and implementation of development work in the sphere of Business and Community Engagement which will necessarily involve cross-team co-operation.

The project case studies caused some surprise in certain quarters.  After interviewing over 20 staff from senior managers to practitioners via supporting teams, we had many differing viewpoints and not necessarily agreement from one interviewee to another.

 One manager told me that he had originally read through the case study, thinking ‘But that’s wrong!  And that’s wrong!’  Only after a while did he realise that what we had captured were the perceptions of the interviewees.  We had captured what they thought was the truth, rather than what actually was the truth.

 Any review of processes or cross-institutional topics must necessarily attempt to do the same.  To have two people show disagreement about what exists or not shows a lack of understanding, or the absence of an efficient dissemination of facts.  Communications are inevitably a challenge in organisations.

Modern technology brings with it many opportunities to miss vital information.  Anyone faced with an inbox full of unopened emails will tend to look for familiar topics and communications that they know they need to read.  Anything else runs the risk of being left unopened or even deleted unread.  Intranet pages, wikis and blogs – even the old fashioned newsletter – are all reliant on the willingness of the reader to find time to search them out.

When undertaking interviews for a process review the interviewer must refrain from showing surprise or challenging any answers to questions or assertions from the person being interviewed.  Many people, if challenged can become uneasy and will become more careful about any further information to be volunteered.  The interview may as well be terminated if a procedure manual is brought out – because the manual shows the process as originally designed.  It may never have actually operated that way, or it may have simply evolved over time. 

Perceptions tell at least as much of a story as does the actual truth!

As the project comes towards an end, JISC infoNet have launched the permanent online resource arising from the project.

The Embedding BCE infoKit provides the sector with both the findings from the project and the methodology and tools to allow institutions to carry out their own review of Business and Community Engagement activity.

The resource was launched at Aston University’s conference facility on 10 December.  Delegates heard presentations from each of the five institutional partner institutions as well as from the project team and Simon Whittemore, the BCE Programme Manager from the JISC Executive.  All the presentations are available from the Slideshare account of Andrew Stewart from the JISC Advisory Services BCE Team.

 Andrew has also created a useful list of resources relevant to Business and Community Engagement.

There will be a number of further disseminations about the project, its methodology and findings.  One such has already been delivered by myself at the JISC Winter Fayre hosted by JISC RSC Scotland North & East.  The next will be at the annual conference of the New Engineering Foundation on 8 January 2010 in London.

A one-day workshop to promote the resource and the benefits of undertaking a review of Business and Community Engagement is to be developed as an addition to existing JISC infoNet workshops.  More to come later!

The project uncovered lots of good practice during the reviews of our five institutional partners.  A particularly interesting and successful way of marketing courses to employees was reported at Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology. 

 The college has a centralised Business Development Unit that undertakes the marketing of courses to company employees, the bulk of which lead to an NVQ qualification.  Rather than market the courses from the college viewpoint, the unit takes company templates and produces marketing materials based on company standard documentation that promotes the courses to employees from the company’s viewpoint.  The company is thus offering its workforce the opportunity to gain qualifications and these are offered in partnership with Shrewsbury College.

This is a less threatening offer to those employees whose experience in education has been less favourable and the college is thus able to widen participation and ensure inclusion.  Depending on the type of company, the college is often able to build on the success by marketing the successes of a course to the same company’s employees at different depots or sites, usually with a photograph of the successful students photographed against a background of their own depot or company vehicle.  Again, the emphasis is on the company’s image and branding rather than the college, whilst ensuring that the college name and logo is featured as the facilitating partner every time. 

The project is holding a free one-day dissemination event on Thursday, 10 December 2009 at Aston Business School Conference Centre, including free accommodation and an evening meal on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 at the Centre.  The event will feature sessions by both project staff and representatives from the institutional partners and members of the Programme Team from JISC.

The event will be of interest to senior managers with responsibility for Business and Community Engagement within institutions.  It will also be of interest to managers of core business functions such as HR, Finance, IT, Marketing and any co-ordination functions or service providers to Business and Community Engagement practitioners.  The event will also launch the permanent online resource, to be hosted by JISC infoNet.

With the partnership work drawing to a close, we are now at a stage where we can identify common themes and issues running across the partners. The final resource to be hosted on the JISC infoNet website will have content of interest to a number of managers and internal teams within institutions, not just those directly involved in engagement with businesses and the wider community and not just IT Managers – the traditional JISC audience in addition to practitioners and senior management. In some cases, some of the issues which arise in one area have knock-on effects on other areas. Hardly surprising for an activity that is emerging as a major priority to sit alongside the long-standing core areas of Research and Teaching & Learning.

On Thursday 16 July 2009 I gave some initial feedback to a meeting of IT Managers, brought together with the assistance of UCISA by JISC Netskills as part of the BCE Awareness and Education for the Wider JISC Community project.

The IT-related feedback included such issues as the need for access to network file structures external to the institution by those who spend the greater part of their time working off campus.

Whilst Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are available to most staff delivering work-based learning or CPD on employers’ own premises, it is not always possible to develop learning content without access to networked files and development tools.

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or web-based technologies such as Citrix allow secure access to internal networks from the outside world and are well established in some institutions. But often, these technologies are implemented for students but not necessarily all staff.

Where staff do not have access to their group workspaces and network tools, the decision has to be made whether to use the VLE, which may require travelling to and spending time on-campus, or whether to set up an externally and commercially hosted website which can be maintained from anywhere.

The problem of campus working is exacurbated when you consider that many staff involved in delivering work-based and CPD courses are third-party sub-contractors rather than university or college staff. Particularly in the FE sector, where teaching staff terms and conditions are focussed on the fulfilment of contact hours (as opposed to hours spent travelling to and from different sites), there are many such third parties involved in delivery of training.

If the development of course materials and evidence of assessment is stored on the wider Internet there is a danger of Intellectual Property (IP) being inaccessible or even lost to the institution.

John Burke, Project Manager

I doubt if anyone now will fail to see the importance of BCE activities in colleges and universities as perceived by the Government.

The joining of DIUS and BERR to form a new department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) under Lord Peter Mandelson gives a clear message that the government see the FE and HE sectors as having a vital role in workforce development and creating skills to take the UK forward and combat the effects of the recession.

Amongst other bullet points on an official press release are these:

• Assess the changing skills needs of the UK economy, especially the intermediate and high skills vital in a global economy and design policies to meets them through public and privately funded life long training;
• Invest in the development of a higher education system committed to widening participation, equipping people with the skills and knowledge to compete in a global economy and securing and enhancing Britain’s existing world class research base;
• Continue to invest in the UK’s world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science;
• Continue to invest in skills through the Further Education system to help people through the downturn and to prepare Britain for the future

JISC has already identified BCE as one of its key areas to address and has created a team from the JISC Advisory Services to programme manage a number of projects of which the Embedding BCE project is one.

The interview phase is now complete at 4 of the 5 partner institutions and the task of writing up the case studies is the main one we are undertaking now.  The final partner to commence with interviews is the University of Strathclyde where interviews will start week commencing 27 April 2009.

Of the 4 partners where interviews are complete, 3 of them have undertaken the self-evaluation workshop, utilising the workbook tool whilst the workshop at Keele University will take place on 26 May.

We had a couple of unavoidable set backs due to illness within the partners, but on the whole the progress has been good and whilst we have slipped in terms of our schedule, it does not look, at this stage, as though it will affect the scheduled end of the project.

Shrewsbury remains the only partner to have had their case study delivered as yet and a visit to discuss the findings is scheduled for later this week.

One thing that has emerged, at every partner, is the sheer richness and diversity of BCE activity and the enthusiasm that the people working in this area have for their work.

Future postings will start to include some feedback on findings – tags will be used to allow blog followers to find posts describing progress  or findings or more general comment which may apply to wider or more mainstream activity than BCE. 

Shrewsbury College of Arts & Technology

Shrewsbury was the first partner to start work and we have completed our interviews, undertaking interviews with 17 members of staff.  A workshop to work through the self-evaluation tool was held on 8 January 2009.  This generated much debate amongst the eight delegates who were all members of the Senior Mangement.  At the end of the workshop we had identified strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement for each of the sections within the self-evaluation workbook.  The case study has been written up both from the interviews and incorporating the results of the workshop and this is currently being considered by the college via their formal committee structure.  It remains for us to facilitate some prioritisation of the suggestions for areas for improvement and to help to create an improvement or development plan.

University of Glamorgan

We undertook an initial visit and introduced the project to major stakeholders on 12 January 2009.  Interviews are due to commence during the week commencing 23 February 2009 with 13 March 2009 pencilled in for the self-evaluation workshop.

Newcastle University

An initial visit was undertaken on 12 February 2009.  Interviews are currently being scheduled for early March.

Keele University

The initial visit has been set for 10 March 2009 with interviews scheduled from mid to late March.

University of Strathclyde

Work to be scheduled during April 2009.

A call for Expressions of Interest generated 31 responses from which the five partners were chosen.  A condition of the funding was that one partner should be a university from Scotland, one a university from Wales and one an FE College from England.

Partners chosen were:

• University of Glamorgan
• Keele University
• Newcastle University
• Shrewsbury College of Arts & Technolgy
• University of Strathclyde

Project work with the institutional partners is scheduled to take from November 2008 until the end of April 2009.

At a project launch meeting with the partners in Birmingham on 4 November 2008 four of the five partners expressed a preference for their involvement to be completed during March/April 2009, although both Glamorgan and Newcastle have now agreed to move their involvement forward and Keele looking to identify an earlier date.

 Work with the partners is following a pattern of an initial visit by project staff with the identified internal Project Manager and senior management sponsor or Project Director, followed by an afternoon’s meeting with key stakeholders to identify areas of especial interest and identify who will be interviewed by the project team.

The project is bound to consider how the core business processes of the institution are impacted by BCE type work and whether this causes any process issues such as necessitating alternatives, duplication, exceptions, barriers to undetaking BCE work or any issues of access by BCE partners or customers which mean that they are unable to take advantage of any facilities of the institution that would normally be offered to core or mainstream customers and students.   Therefore there are some expected interviewees amongst the core business support teams, including Finance, HR, Estates and Facilities, IT and Information Systems including both inward and outward facing information systems and respositories.

Following the initial meeting, the institution identifies a 3-day period during which each of the two JISC infoNet project staff can conduct around four interviews each.  These interviews are likely in themselves to identify other desired interviewees for further interviews.

A further event with a number of key stakeholders is held over 4-5 hours as a facilitated exercise where institutional staff undertake a self-evaluation exercise using a tool developed by the project and based on the EQFM Beta Model.  This tests perceptions of staff rather than the actual facts that are identified during the interviews.  For instance, it may be that, at one level, stakeholders think there is a good communications structure for disseminating strategy and policy regarding BCE whilst at a different level or in a different part of the institution staff are unaware of this.

Following this event a case study of the institution is produced and a further facilitated workshop is held to develop priorities for a development plan.  Roles and Responsibilities and an initial action plan will be developed with each partner.

The case studies and development plans are not intended to be published.  However they will be used to inform an online resource to be published on the JISC infoNet website by the end of October 2009.  The resource will be launched at an event at which it is hoped the partner institutions will have some input.