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We’re supporting communications and marketing teams across UCL to ensure that we are aligned in our aims and to strengthen end-to-end services for staff, students and other stakeholders.
In every part of the university we have colleagues working to attract the best students from across the world, to promote our brand and the impact of our research to external audiences, and to ensure that our community of over 40,000 staff and students are connected and informed. Communication and marketing services play a vital role in our continued success and ability to do this.
But as with other functions, the size and complexity of UCL often means that we do lots of similar things in different ways, often achieve results in spite of, rather than because of, our underlying processes, systems and ways of working. Over the last few years the communications and marketing community have been working closely with TOPS to reimagine the way we work – they helped set up the first Community of Practice and piloted the Career Frameworks.
Now, building on what we have learned through the development of the PS Service Catalogue and the Faculty Futures project, we’re supporting Collette Lux, Executive Director of Communications and Marketing, and communications and marketing professionals from across the university to review the function and strengthen institutional cohesion.
Benefits
Through review we aim to ensure we are aligned in our aims, standards and the development of our communications and marketing services across UCL - ultimately strengthening end-to-end services for staff, students and other stakeholders.
As a result of this work, we will:
- Strengthen ways of working across all marketing and communications related teams
- Enable clearer lines of accountability and reporting with and across teams
- Improve staff, academic and student satisfaction with service levels
- Reduce fragmentation and duplication within marketing and communication services
- Support better careers for staff by identifying clear career progression paths
Approach
We’re working with colleagues from central CAM, the Faculties, VP Offices and other central services, and engaging with UCL leadership to better understand our current position and to consider how we might best operate in the future.
Through 1:1 meetings, workshops, focus groups and reviewing existing documentation, and with the support of SUMS consulting, the review will follow three phases: discovery, design and delivery.
- Discovery: January to April 2021
The purpose of the discovery phase is to understand the current marketing and communication services at UCL and look at the opportunities to further strengthen the end-to-end service across the university.
During this time we’ll undertake a desktop based review of the current position, including reviewing KPIs and metrics information, organisation charts, job descriptions and other documents where they exist. And we’ll seek to build on existing good practice in terms of operating models, approaches and service levels and review where we are against the PS Service Catalogue.
- Design: April to July 2021
The purpose of the design phase is to draw on information gathered during the discovery phase and insight gained through the workshops and focus groups to design better ways of operating.
We’ll do this by consulting with stakeholders through a series of meetings to share our findings, look at potential operating models and opportunities for greater cohesion, and aim to agree how to implement changes to achieve greater alignment and improvement to our services.
- Delivery
Once the proposed operating model has been finalised, we will work with UCL’s Senior Management Team to agree on an implementation plan.
Visit the SharePoint for more information about the project and more detail about each stage