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Transforming Our Professional Services

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Faculty Futures

Through Faculty Futures we’ve supported professional services to be more effective and adaptable in order to respond to changes at UCL and across the higher education sector.

Through Faculty Futures we’ve supported professional services to be more effective and adaptable in order to respond to changes at UCL and across the higher education sector. 

The Faculty Futures project – initially the Faculty Blueprint – was set up in 2018 with the aim of strengthening the services delivered to Faculties, and supporting faculty professional services staff by providing them with the skills, tools and opportunities to be empowered to carry out their roles. In addition, the Faculty Futures project aimed to ensure the impacts of the TOPS Programme on faculties were coordinated and well managed.

Over the course of the project, we developed our plans to achieve these aims through extensive engagement with Faculty Directors of Operations, leads in Professional Services Divisions and Faculty staff.

Designing the Faculty Blueprint – Completed in May 2019

We worked with Faculty Directors of Operations, leads in Professional Services divisions and Vice-Provost Offices to build upon the community’s ‘ideas for change’ (gathered during an extensive engagement period in 2017) to create the Faculty Blueprint. The Blueprint looks at the context of how Faculties currently operate, and based on an agreed set of principles, considers how they could operate in the future.

  • If you would like to read the Faculty Blueprint, the Blueprint Principles or the Blueprint FAQs please contact tops@ucl.ac.uk.  
Faculty Self-Assessment – Completed in November 2019

Each Faculty’s Director of Operations worked with their leadership teams and Faculty staff to review the Faculty Blueprint against their own operations. They considered where changes could be made to better align to the Blueprint, how we can help deliver better services to Faculties and how we can support our professional services staff in their skills and career development.

Informed by this work, and in response to changes within the higher education sector and as a result of the outbreak of coronavirus, these aims were refined into three key priority areas. 

  1. Equipping our people by working with our colleagues to develop their skills in readiness for the current and future demands of working in the higher education sector.
  2. Improving our processes by supporting staff to improve processes in their areas, and collaborate on process improvements which span the university
  3. Strengthening our services by collaborating with all PS leaders to deliver a future-proofed set of services for UCL

The Faculty Futures project came to an end in 2021, but work in these priority areas has since developed into new teams at UCL and projects across the university.

What we delivered, new teams and current projects

Equipping our people

We need to adapt the way we work and develop new skills in order to improve service standards and satisfaction by clearly defining our services and setting clear metrics to measure, monitor and report service quality. We also need to build resilience to changes such as the rapid shift to remote working and managing teams remotely. To do this we’ve been working with our colleagues to develop their skills in readiness for the current and future demands of working in the higher education sector.

Supporting smarter ways of working: 

We supported faculty and department leadership to use smarter working tools and techniques that they can share within their teams to help them develop more effective and flexible ways of working. We worked with HR’s Organisational Development to develop ‘Working Smarter’, a capacity-building eLearning series designed to support all staff to reflect on the way we work and to provide practical tips on how to release capacity and prioritise activities.

Developing change and service management skills: 

In collaboration with the UCL change management community, we ran a series of change management bootcamps and developed the Change Management Toolkit to support staff who are either experiencing, implementing or sponsoring change at UCL. 

We’ve also established the Change Management team, bringing together the existing ISD and TOPS Change Managers under the leadership of Julie Bailey – Head of Change Services. By leading on projects, providing advice and guidance, and developing tools and resources, Change Managers will help to ensure that key stakeholders and impacted staff are both engaged in and understand these changes.

    Improving our processes 

    UCL is a huge and complex organisation with lots of different processes and ways of doing things which makes it difficult for services to be delivered in an effective and consistent way. Long standing process issues have led to workarounds that increase cost, take time and reduce service quality. 

    The Continuous Improvement team has been set up to work with all staff and students at UCL to help improve services and make the transactional straight forward and efficient. By cutting out unnecessary activities and creating capacity we can focus more on specialist support to better meet the needs of our staff, and make better use of our resources by focussing on our core institutional mission of teaching, learning and research to provide the best experience for our students.

    Improving key processes: 

    Since March 2021, we’ve been working with colleagues across faculties and professional services to identify and improve key processes, and to deliver a number of strategic, complex and urgent improvements to support the broader UCL strategy and vision. 

    Supporting a process improvement culture: 

    We’ve also been developing the CI community though coaching, training and facilitation to identify and conduct improvement work, and are developing a toolkit to be used across UCL.

    Strengthening our services

    We often get things done through the exceptional commitment of our professional services staff who achieve results in spite of, rather than because of, the underlying processes, systems and ways of working at UCL.

    Our vision for professional service excellence is for effective, efficient and integrated professional services that enable us to: achieve academic excellence, sustain our position as one of the top ten universities in the world, and create an environment in which our staff can personally develop and fulfil their potential. We’re working to strengthen our services by collaborating with all PS leaders to deliver a future-proofed set of services for UCL.

    Aligning end-to-end services: 

    Using what we learned through designing the Faculty Blueprint and supporting Faculty Self-Assessment, we aim to develop and strengthen our end-to-end services by connecting all functional staff across UCL, in teams such as HR, Finance, Commercial and CAM, and in faculties. 

    We’re supporting Collette Lux, Executive Director of Communications and Marketing, and communications and marketing professionals from across the university to ensure that we are aligned in our aims and to strengthen end-to-end services for staff, students and other stakeholders. And we’re supporting leadership and business partners to design and embed a business partnering model across the university that will help us develop and carry out UCL’s strategic plan for 2022-27.

    Supporting our technical staff:

    We’ve been working with the UCL’s Technical Managers Group and the wider community to better support UCL’s Technician Commitment plan, and improve career development opportunities for technical staff. 

    We set up the UCL Technical Staff SharePoint site, as a place for technical staff to build community resources and to share updates on our progress, and in July 2021 launched a bespoke technical staff survey in partnership with the National Technicians Development Centre to understand more about the full breadth and diversity of technical expertise at UCL.