Over June and July I'd been involved in 'Workstrands' at the office. These are working groups drawn from volunteers across our newly formed IT organisation and other parts of the University. Their purpose is to help design the broad shape of the new organisation following a thematic approach - Architecture, Service Delivery, Information Security, etc. Each Workstrand is an overarching theme, containing multiple threads. I have been leading three of these threads split across two Workstrands covering aspects of information security and user administration - things that I led in the old UCS. It has been interesting work, although an ambitious set of deadlines co-inciding with the most hectic part of the User Admin cycle made it relatively challenging to find sufficient time to invest in these areas and do a reasonable job.
The deadline for all our Reports was the end of July, all of mine went in on time laying out what I believe is both a sensible strategy for both workstrands and detailed recommendations based on those proposals. Whilst time consuming the Workstrands have proved a good way of engaging with people I had not met or worked with before, seeing new perspectives and ultimately building a consensus about how we would like our organisation to develop.
While I have been away our Director has been considering our Workstrand reports and designing our new organisation. We will find out over the next few months whether the work we did was heading in the right direction. Tiring as it was I enjoyed it looking at the big picture and working out ways in which things could be joined together and improved. I'd like to do more along these lines in future if the opportunity arises, switching towards a more strategic focus.
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