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Thoughts from our latest Community of Practice: Research Support (Technicians)

30 July 2019

We now have 15 established CoPs at UCL with three more in development. We spoke with CoP members from the recently established Research IT and Engineering Technicians CoPs.

Photo of a CoP workshop

Since our last update we have established Communities of Practice (CoPs) for Research IT and Engineering Technicians within Research Support (Technicians), Facilities Management in Estates, Programme Administration (Teaching) in SRS and Financial Management and Procurement and Purchasing in Finance.

Colleagues in Research IT and Engineering Technicians work in a diverse variety of vital roles across the university, from developing and maintaining research software to manufacturing and producing bespoke components.

UCL is a signatory of the National Technician Commitment and setting up Communities of Practice for UCL technical staff, is one of the initiatives included in our action plan as a way of supporting technicians' career development and ensuring the sustainability of their skills and expertise.

Thoughts from some of the community members

We spoke to some of those involved in the new CoPs about why they joined and what they hope to achieve as part of the communities. 

On joining the community…

Prof Ivan Parkin, Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences and Senior Sponsor for Research IT: 

“Research IT cuts across most of UCL, often in unseen ways, and there is a lot of experience across the university. This CoP will help staff share best practice and bring together colleagues that sometimes feel isolated by the nature of their work. We have already generated new ideas for ways of working that can help improve services for all."

John Bowels, Head of Laboratories for the Department of Earth Sciences and CoP Lead for Engineering Technicians: 

“I decided to join the Engineering Technicians’ CoP as I thought it would be a good opportunity to bring together people who work in a similar area in order to learn and share ideas with each other. Also being part of the CoP gives technical staff a voice at Senior Management level at a time of change in the University and will help raise their profile.”

On the CoP’s plans…

Andrew Gormanly, Manager of Information Systems at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and CoP Lead for Research IT: 

“We are currently planning for three projects for our first year: ‘Common user training’, to provide excellent and consistent training in software development and high performance computing; ‘Safeguarding research infrastructure and data’, a framework to protect research from the failure of critical but old, hard to support, or unsupported IT systems; and ‘Unified authentication across UCL’, to allow users the option to authenticate with their UCL credentials on non-ISD research IT systems without needing to remember additional usernames and passwords.”

Dr Brian O’Sullivan, Manager of Microscale Bioprocessing for the Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering and CoP Lead for Engineering Technicians said: 

“We are still in the early stages of the CoP so our initial projects are based on community-building and sharing best practice. We have a wonderfully diverse and multi-faceted skills base, but there is a danger that we can become isolated and siloed. Our ‘Talk and Tours’ project literally brings people together, to see how we work in our various roles, and to share best practice. We also have two ‘Knowledge Database’ projects which will tap into our wealth of expertise around areas of health and safety and risk assessment and make the information accessible to technicians across UCL.”

Next steps

UCL currently has over 1,000 CoP members and over 40 CoP-led projects across the institution. There are 15 CoPs across eight professional service areas and our goal is to set up CoPs across all major service areas at UCL.

We are currently developing a CoP for Pre-Award Management in the Research Support (Pre-award) family to be set up in September and are preparing for both Recruitment and Talent and Learning and Development in HR.


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