- A Mind for Numbers
- Accelerate
- Agile Project Management for Dummies
- Algorithms to Live By
- Atomic Habits
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide
- Banking on It
- Brexitland
- Build Your Dream Network
- Bulletproof SSL and TLS
- Business Analysis
- Collapse
- CompTIA Security+ Practice Tests
- CompTIA Security+ Study Guide
- Corporate Rebels
- Countdown to Zero Day
- Creative Acts for Curious People
- Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo...
- Cryptanalysis
- Crypto Trader
- Cryptography
- Culture Code
- Daniel Goleman Omnibus
- Deep and deliberate delegation
- Dhl
- Drive
- Effective Python
- Every Tool's a Hammer
- Exam Ref AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
- Expert Scripting and Automation for SQL Server...
- Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories
- Fixing Your Scrum
- Fundamentals of ServiceNow Administration and...
- Future Leader
- Future of Violence - Robots and Germs, Hackers and...
- GCHQ Puzzle Book
- Getting Things Done
- Harvard Business Review manager's handbook
- Hooked
- How Google Works
- How to Take Smart Notes
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- HTML and CSS
- I Think, Therefore I Am
- Itsm Value Streams : Transform Opportun
- JavaScript and jQuery
- Kill It with Fire
- Leaders Eat Last
- Leading change
- Leading Without Authority
- Lean Thinking
- LONDON'S UNDERGROUND.
- Managing Successful Projects Prince2
- Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2
- Measure What Matters : OKRs
- Meteorology today
- Mindf*ck
- Modern Cryptanalysis
- Modernist cuisine at home
- Money Revolution
- Never Split the Difference
- New One Minute Manager
- Open Circuits
- Oversubscribed
- Permanent Record
- PHP 5 advanced
- Practical Docker with Python: Build, Release and...
- Practical electronics for inventors
- PRINCE2 for dummies
- Pro Python 3: Features and Tools for Professional...
- Pro SQL Server Always On Availability Groups
- Pro SQL Server on Linux: Including Container-Based...
- Professional Scrum Master Guide
- Project to Product
- Radical Simplicity
- Rules of People
- SAFe 5.0 Distilled
- Sapiens
- SEARCH INSIDE YOURSELF- TPB
- Secret Barrister
- Securing SQL Server: DBAs Defending the Database
- Site Reliability Engineering
- SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out
- Start with Why
- System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch...
- T-SQL Fundamentals
- Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics,...
- Teach Yourself Setting Up a Small Business (Teach...
- Team Topologies
- The Art of Deception
- The art of invisibility
- The Chimp Paradox How Our Impulses And Emotions...
- The coaching habit
- The code book
- The Courage To Be Disliked
- The DevOps handbook
- The Epic Guide to Agile
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership...
- The Go Programming Language
- The Golden Ratio
- The Introvert's Guide to the Workplace
- The Manager's Path
- The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the...
- The outward mindset
- The Phoenix Project
- The Professional Product Owner
- The Unicorn Project
- Turn The Ship Around!
- Visual Thinking
- Weapons of Math Destruction
- Who Moved My Cheese?
- Work Rules!
- Working Out Loud
- Writing An Interpreter In Go
- Wrong Fit, Right Fit
Ucisa Support Services Conference 2016 – Learning and Listening
This was my second year attending the Ucisa Support Services Conference. I shared my experiences from last year which described my first encounter of a conference of this kind, and some rules that made up a personal survival guide. This year I am writing about the listening and sharing of ideas.
All Universities are tackling similar issues, and the SSG Conference is a great way to gather ideas and provide some perspective to compare your own journey. It’s not just about reassuring yourself on your own journey, but also reassuring others that their journey is moving in a positive and successful direction.
Ideas that are never shared will always fail to achieve their full potential. The originator of the idea may never know how the idea spreads or is incubated, but that doesn’t matter. Some form of recognition is nice, but that’s not the reason we share our ideas.
This was something I learned early on in my career in IT, where sharing a simple idea to a persistent problem resulted in a shelf edge label being placed on every shelf in almost every Tesco store in the country. The problem was locating products and all I did was highlight that all the information was available but unused. I didn’t receive any recognition, it was a passing comment, but that seed grew into something much bigger.
During my career in Academia, I have so far experienced five IT departments supporting Staff and Students. A common theme has persisted throughout, that we are alone in the industry and are always experiencing new problems for the first time. I have seen so much wasted effort where solutions are developed in a vacuum, encountering all of the hurdles and gotchas that others have already identified, and usually ending up with relatively the same result.
I am so happy that my latest IT department doesn’t always think this way. We see ourselves as being part of a community of IT departments in Academia, and the Ucisa SSG Conference helps to bring us all even closer. There will always be team members that don’t want to listen to others, but we can slowly convince and influence them otherwise.
Reflection is a skill that needs to be learned, embraced, and accepted. Team members need to be empowered to reflect and time should be allocated for team and service retrospectives. Self-reflection is great for individual development and for us, our ability to be more self-aware was improved by learning more about ourselves through Insights Discovery. This is my Personal Insights Discovery Profile.
I felt extremely proud of Tim Ingham and Kerry Pinny and the IT department they were representing in their 20×20 session entitled ICT vs Academics. It’s refreshing to hear, and brave to share, the honest opinions of the people you are there to support. It’s impossible to please everyone, and this was reflected in the offline comments after the session. It seems many people don’t or can’t talk openly about the potentially negative opinions of the people they support. If nobody is talking, then we can’t help each other.
There was a general theme forming that IT departments often do what suits themselves best, from their perspective, rather than listening to the people that they are supporting. By taking the time to better understand the audience they are supporting, it not only improves the communications with the IT department, but also helps produce the most productive, reliable, and focused IT Services offering.
It was interesting watching the presentation on Box, an online collaboration platform. The comments from others indicated that a single collaboration platform is no longer possible, as the people you support will always want to use the platform of their choice, as well as the one they are forced to use by the people they are collaborating with.
This creates lots of consumer level accounts storing unknown amounts of corporate data, secured by various privacy statements, and stored in various regions of the world. By ignoring the problem, the IT department gives their people no choice but to reduce their security by opening accounts that aren’t supported by their IT department.
Should IT departments offer multiple online collaboration platforms, safeguarding their people with Model Contract Clauses, institutional authentication, and security policies? The debate continues, but it’s important to remember that IT departments can be selective with the individual features they provide and support on these platforms.
The presentation “Think and Act Like a Hacker to Protect Your Company’s Assets” by Paula Januszkiewicz proved that you can make IT Security interesting and understandable by all. The conference room was absolutely silent, everyone was paying full attention. That’s very impressive, and another great reason for attending Ucisa SSG conferences. It’s sad that so many others who didn’t attend the conference missed out, as everyone in Academia needs to understand and get excited about IT Security.
With my batteries recharged, enthusiasm high, I am now excited to get back to work and bring about change where I can. I see the Service Desk as the heart of the IT department and the people providing this critical service need to supported and empowered to enable a faster, more effective, and more efficient support service. If we know our audiences better, we’ll also naturally provide a more personalised service.
I want to get out of the office more and talk to the people who use our services. I want to be listening to the complaints, even those that are spoken over teas and coffees in distant kitchens all over the campus, these being some of the most important and honest comments that will otherwise never be communicated with the IT department.
I am really looking forward to another busy year and the next SSG Conference in 2017. There are many plans and ideas that I’d like to achieve in the next year, and maybe some of that will be worthy of a future 20×20 session. As a technical team player, who is learning to be more social and less socially awkward, it will be interesting to see how much personal progress can be achieved in the next year.
Links
UCISA SSG16 Day 1: People, Service, Duty UCISA SSG16 Day 2: Boxes, Bees, Dance UCISA SSG16 Day 3: Thinking, Hacking, Brilliance Ucisa SSG16 Conference Presentation Videos and Resources