I am sure that by now you know that in Continuous Improvement we strive to continually improve the things that we do. It is not just in our name, it is what we do every day.
Graeme recently wrote a blog post about how we create and implement strategy and this blog is about an example of an idea and action that was generated as part of a strategy, developed and implemented, and then improved – at least once.
Intrigued? I hope so. I am going to start this blog off and then my colleague, Jacquelyn will carry on with part two next month and talk about how we made improvements.
One of our aims over the last year or two has been to improve how we communicate and promote the work of the CI team. One of the ways we hoped to do this was by developing a method or space where colleagues across the University could see what we offer, how we can help them and to provide information about our training, tools and techniques, experiences and case studies. A sort of one-stop shop with lots of information. We had a small workstream that worked together to improve our communication.
Last year, we launched the – if you haven’t looked at it before, I would encourage you to do so. Colleagues in the workstream worked together to plana and write content, draft pages, and create the SharePoint site. We have a bit about us, a section on the training that we offer, the support we can provide, how we manage benefits, case studies of previous pieces of work and blogs we have written previously. The site is a great resource and when we launched it, was full of useful content, it looked fantastic and well laid out.
When putting the site together there were a couple of things we did that we liked at the time, but quickly found that updating the site with any changes, we could have done things better. One example of this was how we put together the pages documenting the training courses that we offer. When creating these pages, we wanted to make it easier for people to see what courses we offer, what they could achieve by attending them, as well as how to sign up. I take full responsibility for this – I put the training pages together. I set it up, added them into categories and made it so that people looking for a course that could help them to manage their time better or to learn more about how to prioritise tasks, how to solve a problem or improve a process, could easily see what courses would be beneficial.
At the time, it seemed like the best way to lay out the training courses we offer, but if there were any changes, it was difficult to catch all of the places that we needed to make the same update. For example, we added a new training course How to improve your day in 10 minutes – and it had to be updated in three different places. Not the best use of anyone’s time and it had the opposite effect of what the training I added was hoping to achieve! There definitely had to be a better way to have this set up.
This is where Jacquelyn comes in – I moaned, she listened and she came up with a solution. I’ll not give that solution away right now. We will cover that in a blog for next month. In the meantime, if you haven’t already seen the , have a look at it and see what we do and how it can help you.
