Message from the Programme Director
Dear Colleagues,
It has been a busy start to the year for us all - that Christmas lull is now just a memory, and the daffodils are getting into their stride. Here’s the February update from the POST programme, including some of the transformation initiatives across the University.
The Service Leads met with their segment group members in January to further our development of UCD Persona profiles. Personas are characters developed to represent different kinds of colleagues or students. They are a critical aid in community-focused change as they help to keep the focus on people - their needs, concerns, and experiences. Stay tuned for more information on Personas over the coming weeks.
In terms of the projects running, the updates below show that some of the teams reached important milestones since the start of the year whilst others have established their objectives and clear timelines for the months ahead. For example, take a look at our conversations with Juliette Mora and Liam Alfred to learn more about what is happening in the CRM and FinPOST projects respectively.
Another topic in this update is how a focus on ‘benefits’ can be used to ensure we (in the broad sense) get the best from a piece of change work. As we all know, a challenge in implementing many separate changes across the University can be ensuring consistency in how benefits and outcomes add up to make things better overall, as well as the challenge of ensuring alignment to overall strategic direction. The POST Benefits Lead, Aoife O’Toole, talks about Benefits Management and how POST is working with the community to help use the focus on ‘benefits’ to deliver the outcomes we want.
Staying with the topic of benefits, as through the transformation planning strand of this year's Integrated Business Planning process, POST is continuing to support colleagues across the University in developing proposals for service, process, and systems transformation. A key aspect of proposals will be "freeing up people's time" - academic, staff, students - and aligning with the target benefits set by UMT for these types of initiatives. For more information visit the University Planning website.
Regards,
Michael
Projects in Focus
Clinical Placements Strategy Project
This project targets the complex challenge of managing clinical placements for over 2,200 students. It aims to streamline placement processes, ensure consistent support across clinical settings, and strengthen UCD's collaboration with clinical sites to enhance experiences for both students and staff. Over the next few months, the project team, led by Prof Jonathan McNulty from the College of Health & Ag Sciences, will work with key stakeholders to capture the current risks and issues and to agree an approach to delivering the project. These stakeholders include the College Teaching & Learning Committees, the Clinical Placements Community of Practice and representatives of those leading clinical placement activities across the University.
Health and Safety Management Project
The UCD Safety, Insurance, Operational Risk and Compliance (SIRC) Office plan to introduce a comprehensive software solution to facilitate the management and monitoring of health and safety compliance across the University, to help the University meet its’ statutory requirements and to create a safe place of work for all staff. This project aims to procure and implement a new software solution where none currently exists to support safety management processes, and will include the implementation of an online incident reporting system across the University. Sarah Carry, SIRC Manager, and Sarah Allen, IT Services are the business manager and the project manager respectively and will work closely with representatives from Colleges, Schools and Units throughout. The tender process for this software is currently underway and we expect to update you further on this shortly.
