New Leadership Model and alignment with the Student Lifecycle Project
12 Jul 2019
The New Leadership Model across the DSE and Faculties recently confirmed a number of further appointments into the senior (Grade 8/9) positions, with the vast majority of these roles now being filled.
A small number of remaining roles are in the process of being recruited to. The group of colleagues confirmed in these posts now join the wider, PS Leadership Team across the DSE and Faculties.
As we have our new leadership team in place and these colleagues now begin to take up their roles, the “New Leadership Model” phase has now passed and this terminology no longer reflects the on-going work of the project. To better represent the relationship alongside delivery of the Student Lifecycle Project (SLP), the continued organisational design* project across the DSE and Faculties will now be referred to as the Student Experience Project (SEP). Both projects are focused on making things better for students and simpler for staff.
Work on the next level of organisational design across the DSE and Faculties had been temporarily paused in response to feedback from senior colleagues, to consider how best to proceed in tandem with the roll out of the SLP and ensure that the right structures would be in place, to support our new processes. This work has now been re-started, with workshops having recently taken place to review timescales and dependencies, to inform our organisational design approach.
One of the options under consideration for the Student Experience Project is to move to a ‘thematic’ approach for organisational change. This would look at organisational design by function (e.g.: up and down all grade levels by functional area, such as Recruitment and Admissions) rather than looking at specific grade levels across all functions at once. This approach would ensure we get the right structures in place for colleagues at all levels, based on their primary activities and the ‘thematic’ nature of how SLP is being rolled-out.
What is each project delivering?
1. Student Lifecycle Project (SLP): Business process and IT system change, to improve our student administration.
2. Student Experience Project (SEP): Organisational design for the DSE and Faculties, to work with these new processes and improve the experience students have.
The first set of new functionality from the SLP was released on Monday 1 July 2019, seeing Microsoft Dynamics CRM come into use for a limited number of marketing and recruitment colleagues. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a platform that enables colleagues to record interactions with external (student recruitment) stakeholders including international agents and advisers, UK school and colleges, sponsors and collaborative partners. When fully implemented, Microsoft Dynamics will help co-ordinate, monitor and plan our recruitment activities with students and schools. This marks a significant improvement for the University, enabling us to standardise recruitment processes and concentrate expertise around a single CRM system.
Transition planning for the next SLP release for Applications and Admissions is also now underway. We are mindful of the work involved in this release for a large number of colleagues, and are working through a number of plans to ensure that we approach this significant piece of work in the best way for everyone involved. Following this current planning, we will be able to give more details on next steps for both the Student Experience Project (SEP) and the continued roll-out of the Student Lifecycle Project (SLP).
Simon Merrywest
Director for the Student Experience
* Organisational design refers to how our people are structured in order to best deliver our objectives of supporting students before and during their time studying at the University. In other words, it’s the detail about where we sit, who we work with and what we do, and how we organise ourselves to be as effective and efficient as we can.