Wednesday 14 November 2012

SSB, PSE and other acronyms

One of the penalties of being away is coming back to a diary full of meetings and the last two days have been very busy. Monday was our Service Strategy Board which began with a presentation from our Problem Manager on where we are with problem management and how he is taking it forward. He now maintains ownership of active problems which has improved the monitoring of them, and he is working with our helpdesk to achieve a more consistent service catalogue and logging against problems. We are also trying to be more proactive about problems, reducing their impact where possible, and this was used in our recent release of our new student desktop where known issues where flagged in advance and publicised. This will involve close working with our release manager.

We had our usual look at progress of projects and other ongoing work in the service areas. It was good to see that our mobile app, iSheffield is proving very popular with students. We approved two new projects, a review of our Student System which is just getting underway, and a new way of looking at recruitment and outreach data. We also had for information a document of lessons learned from projects over the years - really interesting to see how things have changed.

Yesterday we had our Professional Services Executive which opened with a presentation on the impact on us of The Bribery Act. Expect more training and awareness raising sessions if you are in a high risk group. We had an interesting debate on whether me and Kath should have accepted a car that one of the exhibitors was giving away in a raffle at Educause last week! Other items covered included an update on the planning process and review of the University Strategic Plan, and I did a presentation on how the consumerisation of IT is affecting us, challenges and solutions.

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