A key aspect of delivering our future ambitions is to reduce complexity, assure reliability and continue to enhance support to our professional and academic staff and students. The initiative on Building our Community (BoC) is designed to achieve this.  BoC is designed to deliver the “Globally Connected University” goal of our Strategy 2025, for the benefit of all staff and students.

Recently the University Executive spent some time reviewing the schedule for BoC work and discussing the overarching principles.  For me, there are some key common principles as we evolve our joined-up processes across the campuses.  We need to target and measure the enhancements we wish to make. We need to evolve a more streamlined digital way of working (some systems will need to be fixed to make this work). We need a culture of trust that ensures core services touch down with staff and student users in an effective way relevant to their location. We need to ensure enquiries are dealt with effectively, and not passed from place to place. We need to ensure student support is available on a 24 hrs basis, where necessary. We need to provide Professional Services colleagues with opportunities for progression and change in their roles. We need to ensure academic colleagues can focus on academic activity. We need to improve effectiveness all roundand measure this. We need to share a clear understanding of the operational model as a ‘business partnership’, meaning functions operate in collaboration across different areas, with goals and processes determined in an agreed manner.

For all this to work the nature of our institutional planning cycle and process will need to be revised, to ensure that our core academic strategy determines the support services and hence resources needed to meet staff and student needs.

BoC also offers an opportunity to reassert delivery of services with the refreshed University values at the core of all activities.  The leadership of BoC is the Secretary of the University, the Chief Operating Officers in Dubai and Malaysia, the Global Directors in Professional Services and the Directors of Administration in Schools.  They are working with a core project team. 

I visited this project team, who are based in room G.03 in the Lord Balerno Building in Edinburgh, recently and was fascinated to see the detailed mapping and dialogues being undertaken around the HR service functions that are currently being focused on. It is so vital that colleagues are fully engaged in sharing their experiences and their professional expertise.  Change can be unsettling, but change with a clear purpose can be liberating and energising. I know how much colleagues strive to give the very best experience to students and fellow colleagues, and will embrace the opportunity to do this in the changes ahead. There is more detail on the BoC site you may have a comment to make here too.

Richard A. Williams
Principal and Vice-Chancellor

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