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Visioning Service Excellence at Alliance Manchester Business School

Alignment to PS Visions and ambition:

Background:

Since the start of 2025, Alliance Manchester Business School’s (AMBS) Marketing, Communications, and Recruitment Team has been evaluating which of the four elements of the University’s PS Vision they could most have the most impact on and where their focus should be. To drive this initiative forward, a group of senior AMBS marketing and communications colleagues were convened for a series of planning days throughout 2025. These sessions were dedicated to enhancing process improvements across the department, ensuring the delivery of the best possible service to stakeholders.

The planned improvements are aimed to enhance service delivery, increase efficiency, and strengthen collaboration within the team. Progress is being meticulously tracked through agreed action points and regular review sessions to ensure measurable impact.

Situation Prior to the Project

Prior to this project, the team had been collaborating closely with external management consultancy, AGAR, for 2-3 years on team Insights profiles. This collaboration focused on optimizing team dynamics and achieving better results through effective teamwork. With the launch of the PS Vision, the team explored how they could integrate these Insights learnings to deliver the vision for the benefit of AMBS and the wider University.

Objectives

These sessions aimed to:

  • Decide where the team could have the most impact when considering the PS Vision.
  • Utilise the different skills, knowledge and personality traits within the team to ensure the right people can effectively deliver successful projects.
  • Enhance processes and efficiency
    • Identify and map out current workflows to pinpoint inefficiencies and areas for improvement. Streamline processes to reduce duplication and ensure a more structured, consistent approach.
  • Adopt a system to support new ways of working
    • Explore, select, and implement a digital tool (e.g. Monday.com) to enhance collaboration, workflow management, and transparency.

Approach and Challenges

Senior members of the team came together as a group for regular development sessions working with AGAR. These sessions enable the team to step away from day-to-day tasks and take a deep dive into what they want to achieve and how to achieve it.

Using Insights learning, the different personalities, skillsets and knowledge in the team to ensure that everyone has a voice and can share their thoughts. These are then discussed, challenged and developed until everyone agrees on the best route to achieving the goals.

Challenges encountered during the project:

  • At the start of the process there was a lot of discussion around what our priority from the PS Vision should be with different members of the senior team putting forward differing views. These were all carefully considered before a majority group decision was made to focus on service excellence.
  • The Insights work with AGAR helped the team with these discussions and in the decision-making process as everyone had a platform to share their thoughts and opinions. Discussions weren’t dominated by the extroverts in the team with a preference to take the lead; those with more introverted tendencies also had an equal input.

Outcomes and Key Learnings

The project is still in its early stages and changes are only just starting to be rolled out. A key element in helping the team work more closely and effectively with each other is the introduction of the cloud-based project and workflow management platform, Monday.com. This will give greater visibility to work and projects being carried out across the team, drive efficiencies and ultimately enable us to deliver a better service for internal clients.

Ultimately, by working together in this way the team has been able to work together in shaping the future direction. This has driven increased cross-team engagement and buy-in of plans and resulting projects.

Key takeaways:

  • A better understanding between members of the team.
  • A clearer understanding of team aims and objectives as all of the senior members of the team has been involved.
  • A clear focus for activities that is aligned with the University’s PS Vision.

How can this be applied to future projects?

  • Enables the team to apply a similar approach when taking on new projects, ensuring that service excellence is the focus, while also considering sustainability, agility and inclusivity.

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Considerations

The working group consists of all the senior members of the team from marketing, communications and recruitment. The work on Insights profiles across the team ensured that there was better understanding of personality traits and how people work most effectively.

Feedback

'I've been working with senior members of the Alliance MBS Marketing, Communications and Recruitment team since the start of 2025 to help them focus on their priorities in order to deliver service excellence to their stakeholders. Based on our previous work looking at the teams' insights profiles, we've had many insightful discussions and the team members have agreed on actions to take them towards achieving their goals. It's been fascinating to hear the varied perspectives and ideas shared among the group and then using various management models, witnessing how these formulate into a cohesive plan of action.' - Krista Belcher, Consultant, AGAR

Contact Information

For further information, please contact:

  • Martin Starkey - Senior Marketing Officer: Analytics, Campaigns & Optimisation, AMBS, Faculty of Humanities.