Time for a reset on process?

This past couple of weeks I've been very lucky to have, off the back of some of my recent videos and blogs, some progressively minded colleagues who I've never met before call me up and ask if we can have a chat to see if maybe my ideas can help them with some of the current problems and niggles that they're facing. This kind of out of the blue call for help is yet another factor in what makes what I do so enjoyable. But it was where those conversations went that really drove home two key aspects of why I love what I do (and to a degree, even more drive to make what I seem to spend an awful lot of my time doing become an official part of my job).

The first is just how blindingly obvious the importance is of having an occasional physical presence on campus. Don't get me wrong, there are many aspects of hybrid working and the flexibility that the autonomy of being academic member of staff provides that I don't think I'll ever want to give up (another blog for another day on hybrid working and that one size does not fit all). But, there is definitely something to be said for the opportunities that random run-ins, agenda-less assemblies, and directionless discussions provide. Every time I have gone onto campus for an in person meeting, I have found the experience more rewarding and more discursive. This is particularly true with hybrid meetings, where those on camera continue to sit and wait for a break in the conversation to make their point but those in the room fare far better by being more able to naturally play off the last thing said and off the expressions and body language of those in the room with them - the whole experience is more organic, less stilted, and just... better. Plus, I really need the exercise of running or walking to get there!

The other reason, and the thrust of this particular tale, was what having those chats and hearing the plight of the people who were interested in adopting my ideas did. They opened my eyes to a whole new range of possibilities. The original idea exploded. And a grand plan of how we might go about changing damn near everything has started to assemble in my mind.

But first, a little context. I'm an academic member of staff - a senior lecturer. Not a manager, or a professor, or a director, or anything else fancy - just a guy. So I'm in that group of staff at a university where a lot flows through us in regards student success and outcomes, but that we are normally massively unaware of the impact our engagement or disengagement, our meddling or our ignorance has on everything around that flow of information. And providing a nice little minefield separating us from all the other staff groups we need for all the teaching, learning, assessment and student experience to work, is process! Pretty much all universities love a little (check that, a tonne of) process. Process is necessary of course. You need your workflows, your checks and balances. And universities also like to change process (check that, they like to add process). But process at universities (and, I'm sure loads of other sectors) is a bit like so many ancient civilisations; or even as a more recent example, London. It's built on over and over and over again. Layer upon layer of processes sitting on top of one another, with very few new layers really considering what their existence is doing to the layers below them. And occasionally you have to ask yourself, "Should we dig it all up and start over? Maybe, like the ruins of an ancient civilisation, we'll learn something from what's buried beneath and try not to repeat ourselves in this much later era." Not something one would consider doing with an ancient civilisation or even London given the rich history buried beneath. But I'm pretty sure that we all have far less of a deep rooted connection to the endless strata that is administrative process.

In order to illustrate why I feel we as a sector need to more strongly consider the idea of a little excavation of the processes that our current higher education society is built upon, I'll (very briefly, promise!) take you back to the Desmond Tutu quote I used a few blogs ago.

"There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Now I have experienced university processes at external events, heard stories while networking at conferences, and conversed with colleagues in communities of practice. And it's obvious that when it comes to trying to do more to meet demand, the higher education sector has a terrible habit of throwing more people at things in an effort to lighten the workload and improve the quality. We appoint infinite "leads" in things, expand admin teams, move people around at key pinch points. And ultimately it all just leads to a lot more people attending a lot more meetings. Or a lot more people doing a lot more tiny steps in elaborate and often unnecessary processes in an increasingly long chain that, at some point, flows through an academic. And depending on the academic, their workload, their understanding of the processes, their engagement with those processes compared to seeing them as a frustrating bugbear to leave until the last minute, things can bottle neck or they can sail smoothly. Usually it's somewhere in between, and everybody scrambles each year, each time, to remember how and where to do it. And we all do it the way we do simply because that's how it's always been done. And when we make a change, we never really stop to consider that maybe some of those people in the river got pulled in a little way upstream when trying to help some other people who fell in even farther up - it isn't always one jetty.

With that in mind, onwards. I had been getting a lot of e-mails as the programme lead, about a process that I wasn't expected to do anything with and was simply being notified about (because you know, we don't get enough e-mails). This was getting a little nuts, and seemed to be done by a series of individuals all doing their little bit one at a time. So I started exploring what the process was, from start to finish. With this process in particular, generally the academic completes a form (in Word 97 format or something ghastly!) and sends it to someone, and then just waits on the outcome. So we aren't really aware of what workloads and burdens on others come about as a result of our suspicions.

Holy hell on a handbike, the endless chain of e-mails and writing and updating and manual interventions I uncovered was just insane!

So I automated it. I took the entire thing, starting with the Word form that was e-mailed as an attachment and replacing it with a Microsoft Form, and turned the whole process into a series of simple approvals and personalised automatic e-mails that no one need write (after the template that pulls in information specific to each case). The reviewing of evidence in this particular process still needed to happen, but everything else either side of that (the process minefield) was practically wiped out. You can watch it here:

Towards the end of the video I alluded to being able to apply this approach to a whole host of other ancient processes. This resulted in several colleagues approaching me as I mentioned earlier, which was this past couple weeks and brings us to now.

And on hearing more about their plight, and the connected processes that came from all sides informing that plight, I began to see how we could take the same small number of already embedded, integrated, and supported tools, and connect them all across one shared platform to simplify an enormous amount of student facing university business (and probably at least some research facing stuff too, but, baby steps). But the barrier to all of that are all the layers of ingrained learning and archaic processes that many people in a general sense constantly struggle to try to change. There's always someone who will say "well, we can't change this because there's this thing there." or "I'd love to do that, but we could only do it if this level also did it."

Well you know what? Maybe we just need to stop not doing something because someone else did something eons ago . Maybe we need to stop not doing one thing because it means changing another thing (maybe that other thing sucks and it's been slowing down all the things after it this whole time). Maybe it's the end times for having multiple ineffective systems that don't talk to one another determine how we go about doing the simplest of things. Maybe we need to stop making everything so damn complicated, take a step back, and take stock of the chaos we've wrought over the years.

Maybe we need to hit the reset button.

Follow me if you will, as we take a quick dive down the the rabbit hole of the shortlist of the ideas that have begun gestating in my imagination. If given enough room to move, these are just some of the things I would relieve the administrative burden on. For those worried at doing away with a lot of admin means doing away with a lot of people, just consider the fact that a lot of these admin people aren't supposed to be admin people - they are supposed to be experience or excellence or enhancement officers that just don't have the time to do what they could be really excellent at, due to the admin thrust upon them by the ancient ways. And it all works using a small collection of supported and interconnected tools in a myriad of combinations that loosely follows this workflow, most of which, including updating lists and things, would be entirely automated:

You can see how these arrows could go off all over the place and be connected in a range of ways. For some examples of where this could be applied, I would take module and programme and all kinds of quality reports currently done as documents that are sent somewhere and turn them into consistent format Microsoft forms that populate Excel spreadsheets as database repositories while simultaneously populating SharePoint list items that are created in a myriad of different places (maybe dept/faculty/central) and pulling on specific inputs from the same source being provided to different teams depending on the different requirements those teams have for their roles within the institution. These updates would also notify the relevant staff/externals in the case of something needing to be reviewed or signed off or commented on. Assessment offence automation could be widened in the same sense as the above idea to provide different categories information to institution and faculty and department levels to give different types of overview for those different levels to analyse and assess and make changes as appropriate, all the while remaining GDPR compliant.

The same fix can also be applied to direct entry application processes. To field trip medical information collection. To continuous surveys for staff and students across a whole raft of different areas. To PDRs, timetable planning, and student reference score cards (that last one is a new idea I've had for providing a more skills-based dashboard view of student information to provide to potential employers alongside more transparent academic outcomes and with less generic text based bumph). The possibilities start to become rather endless, don't they?

But I can't do any of that if the barriers of "yes, but we'd have to change this to do that," remain firmly in place with an unmistakable air of being intransigent. Because you know what? Give me 5 minutes and I'll fix that one for you too - just get out of my (and your own) way and let me help.

Higher education is evolving, and process is certainly not evolving with it. We move people about, we reorganise departments, we repurpose teams, we throw new roles about to lead on things that need focus, we even reorganise whole institutions to work better and achieve more. But the dirty little secret is that if you keep doing everything that feeds the work and the outcomes and the student successes the same way, your reorganisation at whatever level you're trying is just window dressing. If you change something to make something else better for people, but that something only didn't work in the first place because of the processes that sat behind it, and if you don't look at all the tendrils of the ramifications of changing that policy, that regulation, that whatever, then you might just be simply setting yourself up for more work and a poorer experience later on. If you get people all excited about a new opportunity to achieve greater things, but the same processes that have slowed down and stunted that opportunity the whole time remain in place, then you'll just have the same beast by a different name (so to speak).

I would love to say that my finger is hovering over the reset button as we speak, like a progressive and trying to help, non-kingdom ending Sword of Damocles. But ultimately I'm still just the ideas guy. The button isn't mine to push. Though it seems more and more people are interested in making some changes. So who knows, maybe they're eyeing up that button, wondering what'll happen if they push it...