Apr

13

‘Growing Pains’

April 13, 2008 |

I have been recently asked to advise the VC and senior staff of a leading UK University on adopting programme management across the institution. Which has lead me to reflect on my experience of how Universities manage change, the reasons why it’s difficult to deliver and not always successful.

Universities, colleges and national bodies such as JISC face huge challenges in transforming themselves to keep up with the pace of change around them. HE institutions in particular tend to be based on devolved organisational structures (collegiate in nature) and styles of management which vary across the institution making coordination of institutional change difficult to achieve.

If you listen careful when visiting any educational campus you can hear it creaking and groaning from strain of change, especially when it is institution wide. Departments are running a multitude of projects and initiatives which may or may not be coordinated or even relate to a strategic objective of the institution. Projects and programmes fail to deliver to the satisfaction of senior management and stakeholders. I may be painting a bleak as picture but this is one you may recognise.

During the late 90s the importance of good project management was recognised in order to ensure that important projects such as student records systems were successfully delivered. This resulted in an influx of PRINCE2 trained project managers (of which I was one) into the sector to manage numerous successful projects, establishing the importance of the role of project management and best practice.

Institutions today have pockets of well managed projects but in many cases lack the layer that effectively translates its strategy into institutional wide programmes of change and manages them in a coordinated way. The adoption of portfolio and programmes management (MSP) at an institutional level is very much in its early stages but essential to tackling the challenges faced Universities and Colleges.

If this topic interests you have a look at JISC Infonet who are starting a 2 year programme looking into Strategic Planning and its Implementation.

As the BBC would say if you are affected by the issues raised in this blog or have any comments on its content please contact us.


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