• Encourage the teams to view their place in the bigger picture
• Encourage the team to create their why and their how
• Highlight what the team needed to do, identify blockers and generate ideas
• Co-creation of Mission Statements

Approach:

The workshop was held during a May in-person team brief. The Curriculum and Programmes (C&P) team, Assessment and Progression (A&P) team and Accreditation and Special Projects team came together and worked in small groups to fill in a template to answer the following questions:

1. What are the main duties and responsibilities of your team?
2. Think of the people that rely on you and who you rely on. Who is the next person in the chain for any given workflow/task/output that you and your team provide? Examples may include UG and PGT students, assessment leads, DHoEs, external examiners, Head of Department, TLM, HoTLSE etc. Be specific in your examples. Pick three that highlight different users.
3. What would the impact on 1) students, 2) academic colleagues and 3) PS colleagues be if your team did not exist? What is the end result for the University
4. How do we know things are going well and that your team is delivering? How do you know what expectations the people that rely on you have? What might these expectations be? How do you know if things are going less well? What does that look like?
5. How do you wish your team to be spoken about? What do you want to be known for?
6. What is out of your control and what do you rely on others for? Who are these people and how do they know what you need?
7. How do you interact with the users of your work? E.g e-mail/Teams/in-person? Provide examples for different users. How often? Are these methods and frequency adequate?
8. Think of a time outside of work where you have received excellent customer service from a business/restaurant/outlet. Why was it good and what is your in-work equivalent? Think of a time you had bad experience. What is the in-work equivalent?
9. What do you need to ensure more of the good examples and fewer of the bad examples?
10. What is the role of your line manager in providing a great user experience?

Careful consideration was given to the language used throughout the initiative. The term Service Excellence was intentionally reframed as User Experience to make it more relatable to teams. The term ‘customer’ was also avoided, instead discussions framed the questions about always imaging the next or previous person in the chain of a process. Furthermore, the term ‘measure’ was also avoided as this can be off-putting as can references to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Instead, teams were asked how they can tell things are going well or not going well.

During the workshops, Ben Bradley (Talent Development), Jen Lockhart (Operational Delivery Lead for Service Excellence and Digital Literacy), Lorna Dawson (Head of Teaching and Learning), and Rachael Horsfield (Teaching and Learning Manager) circulated among the groups to offer input and guidance to the teams’ responses.

Following the session, all the responses to ‘what do you wish to be known for’, we collated and inputted into Copilot, which helped polish the wording and generate a set of mission statements. This output was one of the key outcomes – resulting in a set of mission statements which was created and shaped by the teams themselves, reflecting their purpose and vision.

Challenges:

• Some of the team put more into the exercise than others
• A small number of colleagues could not make it on the day, leaving key gaps in some sub-teams
• It was difficult to be able to identify many quick wins for improvement from the findings. Some of the findings for improvements will be longer term and relate to several small things incrementally progressing over time.

Following the session, the Workshop Lead received an array of contributions from the teams where they had answered the questions. Some were more thoughtful than others but they key parts were around ‘what would you like to be known for?’ (See above regarding the creation of mission statements).

This enabled the Lead to recognise how to approach silos/gaps in team working and generated ideas for future development sessions around big picture thinking.

Ultimately it gave the team time and space to co-create their version of the best user experience and how they enact this through their daily work.

1. On reflection some colleagues may have done better with a spoken workshop as opposed to needing to written answers to specific questions in a fixed amount of time.
2. Questions were generic enough to enable all levels of experience to participate and reflect on non-work scenarios as well as those in a professional setting.
3. The format of the template could be edited to suit any requirements around large text or specific shading.
4. Workshop lead could have been clearer about where the outputs would go or not go, should there be any sensitivities about the origins of some of the answers in the pack, as the names of a group of colleagues was attributed to each section.
5. The session was not hybrid due to logistical challenges and it may have been useful to do a smaller online only follow-up.

This was a great opportunity to have the whole (or most of the) team together, linking up across functional teams to chat and think about what User Experience meant for them and their role in the University. The outcome of having a clearer view of what a great user experience is in School of Natural Sciences Teaching and Learning meant the team has clear aligned aspirations to work towards to ensure excellent user experience. It also generated ideas for how the teams can work together and where it can increase academic and PS partnership working.

Next steps:

• The next part of the plan is to think about how in another session the teams can look at the digital tools, including generative AI to help enhance processes and communications, with one eye on the output from the user experience workshop.
• Co-locate the C&P and A&P teams to try and tackle some of the barriers to better collaboration.

For further information, please contact:

• Rachel Horsfield, Teaching and Learning Manager, School of Natural Science.