 Felly I'm John Brindwall. I'm your chair for the session. I'd like to introduce Andy Razerick... who's going to take you through leading a project team in a hybrid working environment... facilitate institutional VLE improvements, or I'll let you do the subtitle. I'm off game with two halves. Thank you very much. Hello everybody. I've been at the conference now for almost two days... Wat Whise. I've seen some fantastic presentations, I've seen some fantastic content, and some fantastic slide decks. You're not going to get a fantastic presentation today because I'm not a natural presenter. And my slide deck looks like it was put together by a 12 year old so I apologise for that in front of it. Hopefully you'll find it charming and innocent rather than just plain rubbish. I'm going to split the presentation into two halves. First of all, I'm going to talk Rydym yn ysgolwch, o gyfweld, y projekty gyda'r LLE ac mae'r LLE yn y gwylo'r LLE yw Llywodraeth. Ac y dyfodol, rwy'n gweithio i'r ymddangos o fewn i gyd ac yn ymdegwynt yn ysgolwch yn unigol a'r hybyddiadau yn ymdegwynt ymdegwynt. Mae'n ddweud i'n gweithio'r ysgolwch yn gweithio'r ysgolwch yn ysgolwch. Dwi'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio. I'm a program manager. I work in the strategic teaching and learning team at Huddersfield University, which is part of our vice chancellorate. We're responsible for rolling out institutional projects to improve teaching and learning across the institution. Okay, I was a learning technologist. Okay, so I do have a background in learning technology, but I've been doing project management now for probably seven years. And the reason I moved into project management was we decided we needed to do a VLE review, and I was the only person who had any skills in project management, so it came over to me. That was a two and a half three year project to do the requirements gathering procurement and rollout. And at the end of that everybody realized I was a better project manager than I was an LTA. So that's why I do project management now. I've been to some presentation today where people have told you their life story, and I'm not going to tell you that. If you want my life story, get me after a couple of drinks this evening, then you'll get it whether you want it or not. Okay, so I'm going to set some context. And the reason I'm going to set some context is in the second half we're going to talk about the context of people. And I want to set the context of our university. We come to this conference and we all think our universities are all pretty much the same. We're similar. We do the same kinds of things. We're not. And I actually think as a university Huddersfield is quite divergent. Okay, we have about 18,000 FTE students depending on how you measure it and what year we're in. But we have 75% of those are commuter students. Okay, so 75% of our students are from our local community. So they are from within probably about a 30 to 40 mile radius of the university. That's kind of quite important to know because what happens is we get students coming to the university who have intact peer groups when they come to the university. And therefore trying to generate a sense of belonging amongst those students becomes quite problematic. Okay, we also have very high percentage of BAME students. Okay, and that's reflected in our local community as well. So we have probably about 53% of our students are BAME students. Okay, now bearing that in mind we score really well on differential attainment. We have a very small differential attainment gap and we are still working hard to close that. Okay, these are students by IMD codes. So IMD is index of multiple deprivation. So IMD1 is like the lowest, it's the most underprivileged areas. So it measures things like incomes, access to education, transport networks. If we look at this, you can see that we've probably got again about 75% to 80% of our students come from IMD1 and IMD2. So they come from very underprivileged backgrounds. And then we look at entry qualifications. The majority of our students come to the university with BTECs and other level three qualifications. So quite a small percentage of students come into us with A-levels and that percentage is dropping as the BTECs increase. So we have a completely different student profile to the majority of universities in the UK. There's very few universities that have a very similar profile to us. Okay, Avileys Brightspace. Okay, we got this six years ago. It got a great reception from students and we have a brilliant relationship with D2L as suppliers. I would tend to say Avileys Avileys and actually Canvas Blackbird Brightspace. They all do pretty much the same thing in slightly different ways. For us, the great benefit of Brightspace is the relationship that we have with D2L. We see them as partners, not as suppliers. They help us. They come to our conferences. They advise us. They're interested in the pedagogy as well as in the actual technical aspects of the VLE. We have a fantastic relationship with them. We love them. Okay, so now I'm going to tell you what the project was. That's just all background as to where we are and what we're doing. Right, it's about the module handbook. Every module has a handbook. That handbook contains three elements of information. It has institutional information that is provided by registry. That's things about what you do if you need an extension to your deadline. What you need to do if you want an EC. It has things about academic misconduct in there. Then we have school specific information in there, which is stuff like where do you go to in your school for support? What are the phone numbers? What are the email addresses of everybody? Where are the actual places within your school that you need to go? Then you have module specific information, which is things like your delivery schedule, your assessment schedule, the assessment details, the assessment weightings, the assessment grades. We unpick that. I'm making a massive assumption here that everybody has a module handbook. All universities have module handbook. I'm getting some nods, which is really encouraging. I'm going to flip over to Mente. If you get your devices out, I would be really interested to know how you present your module handbooks to students. Why is that not presenting my results? There we go. That's great. A word or a PDF embedded within the VLE. Three universities doing it embedded at the point of needing the VLE. Two doing a different system to the VLE. One says other. Who was the one who said other? How are you delivering it, please? We don't have a handbook with that. I mean it's broken down. There's like links here and everywhere in the VLE, but also as she calls it, there's PDFs in other places. Just to repeat for the people who are watching virtually, one of the universities here has a disaggregated version across very different systems. Some stuff in the VLE, some stuff on other systems across the university. I'll tell you what we were doing. Our old delivery model was a word document by the majority of you here, which was held on a document management system and then linked to from our VLE. Now it was linked automatically. Our central VLE guys ran some whizzy process that created a link in each module every year to the current version of the module handbook. When we looked at it, we had some issues with that mechanism. Number one, students tended to access it at the beginning of the module only. And we actually did some analytics on this to find out when it was accessed. And there was a peek in access as the module started, which then tailed off after a couple of weeks and then hardly any access to that module handbook again throughout the course of that module. So that information wasn't at the point of need that the students needed it. If there was a change to a school or an institutional change, it became problematic because that meant that an institutional change, every single module handbook across a whole of the university needed to be updated. And sometimes that happens midterm. It's not necessarily something you can schedule for the summer. Okay, so that was a massive admin nightmare. Likewise, if things happened in the school, say for instance, the support for students changed to a different department. There was a reorganisation. All of that school's module handbooks needed to be updated. And it was a manual process. And again, it was rarely visited throughout the whole term. It was rarely visited. So our vision was to actually disaggregate that information that was in the module handbook and deliver it at the point of need for the students. That would give them easy access to the information throughout the module. And it meant that we could have centralised school and student information in a template within our module, which then propagated down to each individual module. So sorry, central within our VLE, which propagated down to each module. So if there was a change to the institutional information, we just had to change it in one place. And all of a sudden, every single piece of information within all of the modules would be updated. Okay. And we started to realise that by doing this as well, we were actually moving our VLE from being a content repository to being a proper learning environment. It wasn't just a content repository with a few multiple choice quizzes in there and some assessment points in there. We had all the information that the students needed at the point that they needed it. It was there in front of them. We also, during this process, thought, actually, you know what, if we do this as well, we're starting to give our students a parity of experience as they move between one module and another. And that's really important for us because we have six schools, now five because we merged two of the schools, but we have students who've studied courses that span schools. So they've studied some modules in one school, some modules in another. By doing this and creating this disaggregated information, we were starting to standardise how those modules looked across the whole of the institution. That didn't mean that we were removing a degree of personalisation that you could add to those modules. We felt that that was really important, that we still left some personalisation so that academics could stamp some personality on their modules. But we wanted a parity of experience for our students. So this happened over a year ago. I'm going to come to that second bullet point first. Matthew Armriding and Liz Bennett. Matthew Armriding is an LTA. Professor Liz Bennett is our director of teaching and learning in the School of Education, came up with this idea. They rolled it out in the School of Education. So that became our pilot. We got incredibly positive responses from the students about this. They thought it was great. We got positive responses from the academics. So we then took it to a number of institutional level meetings, showcased what we were doing. We took it around to each of the individual schools and said this is what we're doing within education. Everybody wants this, that's brilliant. In fact, I think the comment from our registrar when we suggested that we should do this was why wouldn't we do this? So we put together a project team to do this. So it was all a learning technology adviser. It was one from each school. We have a disaggregated learning technology system within the university. It's a technical team. It's just LTAs within each school. And then we have a strategic LTA. We had two senior academics in there as well. We had our central VLE administrator, and we had representation from registry because obviously registry are the people who determine what should go in the module handbook. Okay. So this is the process we went through. We took the template that education development had developed, and we institutionalised it. If you like, we made it slightly blander, something that we could roll out to all the different schools and all the different disciplines. We then got the LTAs from each school to take it to their academics and go, this is what we're thinking of implementing, what needs to change for our school because there are school differences and there are school disciplines. So we basically ended up with six different templates, one for each school. In essence, they were 99% the same. There was just some very minor tweaks that each of the schools made. In that process, we started to realise that the navigation bar, now the nav bar in bright space is like a bar at the top, which has a drop down so you can access different tools within the VLE. Needed some rationalisation. We had developed the nav bar when we implemented bright space six years ago. It was a bit of guesswork. We didn't know which tools were going to be used, which tools weren't going to be used, so we decided at this point in time now that we knew a bit better we could rationalise that. Also, there were new tools that had been introduced that didn't sit on the nav bar. You had to access them in different ways. So we went through a rationalisation of that as well to remove the clutter so the students weren't bombarded by the tools that just were not used. Then we went into an early rollover process. In January, February this year, we rolled over all the academics modules because we realised that there was a lot of work for our academics to do to populate that module template, that handbook template within their modules this year and this year only. Subsequent years, we were all that module over and they would just need to go back and make minor tweaks to it as things changed for the subsequent years. So we rolled over the modules in January. We gave the academics a single step process to be able to copy their content across because we were aware that not all the content may have been in the modules by January. So basically we wanted to give them a module so they could start work on the module handbook and then at any point in time they could just do about three clicks and copy the content over from last year's module into next year's module. And we produced and delivered training. We produced some training centrally and then we gave that to our Learning Technology Advisors and said, you do what you want with this. You do what is best for your school. You roll it out as is best for your school. Make changes to this if you need to make changes to it. Just roll it out. So I'm going to come back to the nav bar. So these are the things that we removed. We removed chat. Nobody used the chat anymore. Everybody uses Microsoft Teams. We used instant messaging. Nobody uses instant messaging. Everybody uses Microsoft Teams. We removed meetings. Microsoft Teams again has superseded it. The tools, the awards, the portfolio, the FAQ and the glossary. FAQ and glossary were hardly ever used. The portfolio we started to realise was a overarching tool and didn't have a place within the module. A student creates an e-portfolio that is module independent. So it made sense to take e-portfolio out of this and place it somewhere else within the valiant landing page. Awards. That's like badges. No-one was really using it. At the meeting schedule we took off as well because that's linked into the meetings. All of those tools, with the exception of the e-portfolio, which we removed elsewhere, can be turned on again by the academic if they were actually using them. By default they're turned off and they don't show in the nav bar. If they go down a couple of menu steps, click the button to turn it back on, they reappear. So basically we simplified it. We got rid of the junk. Then we did sales pitch. We're going to talk about sales pitch just quite a lot later on. We did two awareness sessions in each schools. Organised by the Directors of Teaching and Learning. So we should have got every single academic into those two sessions to tell them what was happening, to tell them why it was happening, to demonstrate what was happening. Again, we had positive response from them. No-one said, oh no, we can't do that. That's not going to work. Everybody was very engaged with it. We do some central learning bike sessions. We should basically drop in sessions. Different subjects each month. We did two learning bike sessions on this. We deliver those virtually. We used to deliver those face-to-face. Since we've moved to a virtual delivery of these, we've got much better engagement with them. For these two sessions, we've got the best engagement ever. We've got over 100 at one of them and 80 people come along to the next one. It should be brilliant. And then we asked the LTAs, the Directors of Teaching and Learning, the Associate Deans for Teaching and Learning to drive this forward in schools, which they did. So now basically it's handed over to the schools. We've rolled over the modules with a new template and we've handed it over to schools. So it's down to the schools to push forward on populating those module templates. We have four nightly team meetings to monitor the school progress. We talk regularly to the LTAs, the ADTs and the Dottles. And we've also developed some reporting in DOMO, which is a reporting tool attached to Brightspace to actually give the LTA some indication of which modules have been addressed, which modules have not yet been touched. So they can use those to go and speak to specific academics and give them the support they need. Okay, so let me show you some really quick examples. Don't push me with any questions on this because I manage the project. I don't really fully understand what I'm showing you here, but just to show you what we're doing. Okay, so we have an information section at the top and basically contains useful information about the course and links to complementary resources. So that was our navbar up at the top there. As you can see, the bit that's highlighted. Okay. And then we have module support, talks about the module leaders, the course administrators, where to go. In the assessment areas, we have assessment essentials, module assessment overview, and then we have the individual assessments underneath, which have got the briefs within them. In the assessment essentials, we get things like academic integrity and referencing information. So this is stuff that's pulled in from our registry central templates. Within learning resources, we have delivery information. So we have a delivery schedule for each of the weeks, what's going on in the weeks, what the activity is. And that's kind of a, if anybody wants to dig deeper into what we've actually done and how we've rolled this out and the structure behind it, I'm more than happy to take an email from you and I'll put you in touch with a guy who understands this inside out and really knows what to talk to you about. And our goal live is term 1, 2023. And I guess if you were to ask me questions, you'd probably ask me about risks and issues. We had a risk initially that our LTAs weren't free-engaged with the process because they didn't fully understand the benefit this would bring to our students. All they saw it as was massive amounts of work for them. So by process of engagement and explaining and understanding their perspective on things, we slowly managed to bring them on board with this and got the engagement from them that we needed. The other issue is that we have recently merged two schools into one. And another school has gone through some substantial reorganisation to the point where the Dean and the Director of Teaching and Learning doesn't actually know who's teaching what modules next year and who owns what modules and who's going to be module leaders and therefore has no one to actually populate the module handbook. So we've come to an agreement with those schools that actually all they need to do for the start of term is to ensure that there is enough information in there to get the students through the first two weeks and then that gives them another two weeks to sort themselves out by which time they'll know who's teaching what module, what the timetable is, what the delivery schedules are and then they have two weeks to bring that up to speed for the rest of the term. Questions? Hello. How will we track the uptake of early rollover editing? Okay, the question we had there was how will we track the early uptake of rollover and editing? We produced a report in a tool called DOMA which links into Brightspace which can actually track when things have been edited in a module. So we can actually see when people have started editing and which sections they have edited, it doesn't obviously give us any quality information it may be that they have just gone in there and put X's everywhere so that's something that we are asking the LTAs to do once we've got some information in there to go and check the quality of that information that's going in there. But yeah, it's essential to the LTAs can run that ad hoc, we run it occasionally and if we've seen low engagement within a specific school, we will nudge that school. Steve? Is there any other applications in the future for this where you think it will allow us onto this to follow handbooks? Yes, the one thing that we are now thinking about is course handbooks because Avila is very much a module based delivery mechanism but actually the majority of courses also have a presence on Brightspace. Now I say the majority, that's not all of them and we are starting to think that we could do this for the course handbook. I've got some people saying no we can't do that because all courses are so different there's no standard template that we could apply to everything that may be the case but I think we need to unpick that first. Okay that's the first thing that springs to mind. There's nothing else that at this moment in time I thought we could disaggregate this. I think there is a risk in doing what we've done and there'd be a further risk if we did this for anything else in a Brightspace perspective that the module actually becomes too cluttered. Okay Now the feedback we got from our pilot last year was it's not too cluttered, it's fine we've got the information where we need it. I think there's a risk if we did anything else within the modules it would be too cluttered and students would find it difficult to find what they need. Right, how are we doing on time? Right, okay. Oh another question, yep. I'm sorry, I've reported that Brightspace is a product that might be a value question. Is it built in Brightspace itself or is it like the party? No, the whole thing is built within Brightspace completely self-contained within Brightspace. Right, managing hybrid project teams I have slightly overrun on that bit I've got quarter of an hour left over. Fabulous. That was good timing then, yeah. Right, okay. No, that's great. Right. I want to talk to you about managing hybrid project teams he's what I do, I'm a project manager. Okay, so yeah again, set the context of our university. We have a hybrid working policy where you can work at home 40% with agreement from your line manager. So three days on campus, two days working from home. Okay. Some staff have fixed working patterns so they'll be in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday home Thursday, Friday every single week. Some like me work flexibly to suit the demand I'm on campus when I need to be on campus when I don't need to be on campus I'll work from home. Okay, if I'm working from home in the morning and someone says oh my god you need to be on campus this afternoon I'm going to campus I'm only 15 minutes away. Some have roles that require 100% on campus can get away from that. Okay, some choose to be on campus 100% of the time. They don't have an idea of working environment at home they would rather work in their office or on campus or some people actually just don't like working in isolation at home they would rather there was some kind of social interaction to their job which they get through working on campus. Okay. But when you're managing hybrid work a hybrid team face to face meetings become problematic because of all of this because some people have fixed working schedules so trying to get them to come in on a Thursday when Thursdays they'll work from home day they don't want to do it. Sometimes you don't know who's working from home who's working on campus at what particular point in time. Sometimes you need to call meetings at very short notice face to face meetings just become a nightmare. Okay, so I'm going to jump all over the place with this, now do apologise at the end. I'm going to go back to Mente. Right. So if you could go to that please. Oh sorry, of course. Everybody got that. So the thing is quality of project manager. Think of a good project manager. What qualities is it that makes them good? I like you guys. Organised is coming out top there and I'm not going to dispute the project manager doesn't need to be organised. But actually I've got some quite soft skill things in there like communication, calm under pressure available, realistic practical, practical people skills I absolutely love, approachable, communicative stakeholder management that's what we're going to be talking about. Okay, clear communicator. So I ran this with a group of students final year chemistry students nearly everything that came back was around being organised and structured and being able to plan. There's nothing about the soft skills. Okay. And at least you haven't put what one of my colleagues put when I did this which was being able to nag people and write spreadsheets. Yeah, Oganchars are a good one. Yeah. So in my opinion key skills with project manager is how to win friends and influence people. Okay. Now, Femsbook by Dale Carnegie written in 1934 nearly everybody's heard of it hardly anybody's read it. Read it. Take into account the context of the time it was written which was 1934 a very different time to what we're living through now it has a slight Atlantic cousin edge to it it has a slight sales pitch edge to it but it's a really good book. I read it when I was about 22 and I'm going to talk to you about later on about how I'm actually really shy introvert and how that helped to change me. Okay. So as a project manager you need stakeholders on your side without the stakeholders on your side and supporting your project you have no chance of making that project a reality and realise in the benefits. Okay. This is what gets overlooked all the time. Your project team our key stakeholders they are the people that will make this happen and they need to be engaged and they need to be on your side as a project manager. Okay. Without them on your side he's going to fail there's no two words about it he's going to fail. So as a project manager you need to be a leader you need to motivate, inspire and lead your team to success. So we're going to talk about the three pillars of rhetoric. I said I'm going to jump all over so we'll all come together hopefully at the end. Okay. Ethos, Pethos and Logos who are not the three musketeers. So ethos is about appealing to your audience's ethics. Okay. What is a ethos? You need to talk to them on a level that appeals to that set of ethics. Pethos is about appealing to your audience's emotions and you can do that by using slightly emotive language but also understanding what their emotions is what makes them happy, what really does make them happy. And Logos or Logos, I don't even know how to pronounce that is about appealing to your audience's rationality so it's putting forward an argument in a logical way to them or a pitch in a logical way to them. Now what I did stand what I have started to realise is ethos and Pethos are inextricably linked but actually they underpin a perspective on rationality. So I can go in with what I think is a rational argument somebody but if I haven't understood their ethos and I haven't appealed to their Pethos it's not a rational argument to them. So you need to understand people's ethos and appeal to their Pethos in order to put forward a rational explanation and a rational argument. Does that make sense? I remember years ago having conversations with a friend of mine who was deeply religious and I'm not and I put forward rational arguments to him which he dismissed because I didn't understand his underlying beliefs and ethos so what was rational to me was not rational to him so that's it it's about understanding the ethos and the Pethos. OK It's a slide, isn't it from one of my other presentations? When you're a salesman when you're a project manager and you're doing stakeholder engagement you are a salesperson you are doing a sales pitch in fact on one of my courses on project management I actually have a section called Selling Your Project and everybody goes I'm not a salesman but it's like you are everybody can sell and if you look at some of the bad sales people you've had they push it, they don't understand your needs they haven't listened to you they don't know what you're doing they don't understand where you're coming from what your ethos is good salesman listens to you and understands he gets to know you so he understands your ethos he knows what makes you tick and he sells a solution to fit your needs and he produces that solution in a logical and rational way and this is what we're doing to get stakeholders on our side is building relationships underpins understanding ethos pathos and building a rational approach to enthusing, motivating and leading a team okay once you've understood that ethos pathos it's a reciprocal arrangement so you build a relationship to understand the ethos and pathos then you use that ethos and pathos to actually build that relationship further okay it makes me sound really manipulative does this seriously okay but you must build a relationship with every member of your project team as a project manager okay so now we're going to come on to the bit about Microsoft Teams and why I think this is really good for doing that okay so the three things that teams is used for large scheduled meetings is one of them okay so the thing I noticed about teams and honestly when we went into lockdown we started running projects virtually rather than face to face I had no idea what I was doing I didn't know how I was going to do it I panicked, just didn't know how to do it but as time went by I started to learn okay so in the large meetings teams meetings Zoom meetings work on the turn taking paradigm okay so that means it's not dominated by the person with the loudest voice or the most opinions people have to put their hand up everybody gets to have a say okay and that's really valuable because sometimes the people who are quieter are the ones that have the most to contribute to a meeting okay so I would say that when you do go into a large meeting and you're sharing that large meeting say if you want to say something put your hand up and naturally Microsoft Teams is taking paradigm and people tend to but be strict so you have to put your hand up if you want to say something create an agenda for your meeting but allow people to tangentially explore topics okay but know as a chair when to take something online and bring the meeting back to the agenda again okay and finish with a chance for everyone to contribute never go because people don't say anything you go Mike any other business, Clare any other business Abdul any other business go around them one by one give everybody that chance to actually say something you'd be surprised how many people still have something to say okay I love this I love the fact that it's that turn-taking paradigm and the quiet people get a chance to talk just ask there are pros and cons aren't there and you were saying about perhaps missing out on the opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting I accept everything you say there and I think from a teaching and learning point of view this also has the same attributes and in other words the same benefit for example the loudest voice doesn't dominate but do you wish that you could have a blend of those face-to-face meetings or do you still accept that in a face-to-face meeting it's easier for somebody like me to interrupt you in this type of environment than sometimes it can seem or not? I've just had a question here from the people who were tuning in digitally about whether a blended environment would be better for meetings where sometimes we have face-to-face meetings as well which allows that interruption and that discussion and that I suppose more interactive a discussion isn't it of topics and the answer to that is yes I think face-to-face meetings are still a necessity and I think there are some things I'll talk about these a little bit later on that you cannot achieve by using Microsoft Teams or I haven't learnt how to achieve just yet and I think you're right I think these are great for 80-90% of your meetings but occasionally a face-to-face meeting allows that discussion that argument even if you want about something and that can be really productive okay and then you have small meetings so small scheduled meetings so that's two, three, maybe even four people tends to be people who kind of know each other quite well in those what I found is take five or ten minutes to be social take five or ten minutes to talk about what you watched on Netflix last night what you're doing at the weekend what you did last weekend where you went on your cycle ride it really helps because most people are working from home and they're not getting that social interaction it helps me, I know if I'm working from home to have that ten-minute social interaction with other people so you're trying to build commonality with that you're trying to get to know people and actually you can take some clues from their background environment I was gutted when people started putting fake environments on their back because I loved getting a glimpse into people's lives I've met people's children people's cats I've seen people with guitars on their wall I've seen people who've got the same cushions that I've got from IKEA and all of those have sparked conversations and enabled me to get to know people better and to build that relationship people with them I have a colleague of mine who had a violin hanging on a wall and I went oh violin did you play a violin she went yeah I spent my first ten years being a professional violinist and realised there was no money in it so now I'm working registry so you find out the most amazing things about people from their background environment I hate the background she put up give something of yourself get something back so if you're prepared to open up a little bit about you if you're prepared to talk about what you did at the weekend about what you did next what you watched on TV last night what you're going to do next weekend where your cycle ride was what you do for your hobbies they are more likely to open up back to you and you will get to know them this works outside teams as well okay by will so for this and the next one recognised value are knocked upon their views and opinions if someone says I think we should be doing this or we should think about this and you go yeah that's a good idea don't put your teams meeting down and do nothing about it and forget about it act on what they have said if you can't act on what they have said explain to them why you can't act on what they have said on their views and opinions it's really important that you recognise those views and opinions and that you action them one way or another okay and the next one is our talk conversations so our talk conversations is when you just phone somebody up to check something or talk about something so sometimes that's through messages sometimes it's through virtual conversations okay social interactions are okay you know what it's alright to send a few messages to one of your colleagues that is nothing to do with work about to do with what they did at the weekend about to do what you're doing it's okay to ring somebody up and just have a 5-10 minute conversation with them that is nothing to do with work it is okay to check upon your colleagues wellbeing if you do this if you start to build these relationships you will start to understand when your colleagues are struggling and you will start to know when you need to check up with them okay these our talk conversations really good for inviting opinions ideas and contributions ring them up, talk about something socially and then go by the way what do you think about what was put in this bit in the template over here you're not catching them off guard you're actually just building that ability for them to feel that they can contribute freely okay and again value recognising act upon that input so back to the face to face okay use your face to face time when you're on campus to build on those virtual relationships that you've started okay go to see people and say hello okay take time to chat in the corridor or in the elevator or walk into another building when you bump into people that are part of your project team or people who are involved with that project have working coffee meetings with them okay have social coffee meetings with them just go hey John what you're doing next Tuesday on campus if you're on campus should we go and grab a coffee okay and engage in social events outside work that these people are likely to be at it is entirely okay in my opinion and in my boss's opinion who is our provice chancellor to spend half a day or a day on campus just going round and talking to people and building that social equity with them it's really valuable so influencing how are we doing on time well about coming up to you ten minutes I'm doing well on time today so use the relationships you built to understand what is important to stakeholders and team members so you can use this with all stakeholders not just with your team members frame your communications to appeal to their ethos and pathos and present a rational curse when you're trying to get them to buy into something and agree to something okay I'm going to give you an example of something that went drastically wrong okay we run an award at the University called the global professional award Warwick run a similar thing it basically all students are invited to take part in this it appeals to our organisational strategy so our synergy with that they get a management qualification out of it at the end of the five qualification to the students he talks to them about employability entrepreneurship and self-management of well-being we went to our midwife department midwifery department to sell this to them because we needed their support in driving their students to partake in this award and we said it appeals to organisational strategy and they went oh you know bother about organisational strategy there's a strategy document somewhere I can't remember what was in it and we said well your students if they do this qualification they'll get a CMI management qualification midwifery department said it's with no value it's no value in our industry that CMI qualification and we said but it will help them get a job and they went they don't need a job they get a job by the end of their second year because there is such a shortage of midwives they get a provisional job offer and we said it will build their entrepreneurship skills and they went nobody sets up as an independent midwife why would they need entrepreneurship skills and we said it may help them manage their self well being and they went yeah well we do some of that in the course anyway said but there's no harm in a bit of systematic repetition so we went away a tale between our legs okay we talked to people in the NHS NHS we talked to other midwives we talked to midwifery students we went back three months later haven't changed anything all we did was reframe our sales pitch and we said it appeals to our core our core values which is to provide the best possible differencing level education we can for our students and then when that's great that's actually our university strategy we just said it's our core values and we said it prepares them for management so it's not about getting them their first job it's about employability planning it's about planning where you go next and taking that next step into management and they went that's great yeah we love that that would be fantastic for our students and we went it's about sustainable career management as well it's about where you go that CMI qualification allows you to move towards that management goal and allows you to plan and move at the ladder so it's not about the qualification it's about the skills you get from doing that management qualification and they went that's fabulous and we said it's about entrepreneurship but actually it's also about entrepreneurship it's about being enterprinising internally within your organisation it's about knowing how to make changes, make things better how to come up with ideas how to go look boss if we did this this would happen and this would happen and they went that's fabulous and we said it's still about wellbeing and they went great okay and they actually said to us this is a really fantastic opportunity can we roll this out to our first graduate students as well as our undergraduate students so what I'm trying to say here it's about framing so influencing people very much is about understanding their ethos it's about using language which appeals to their pathos it's about putting forward a rational argument and framing it against the backdrop of that ethos and pathos and that's how you get people on your side okay so I'm almost there problems still to overcome workshop facilitation I can't do that online like you were saying face to face if I need to unpick a process within a school with about 10 different people I don't know how to do that on teams it just doesn't work for me face to face workshop is always better don't be a slave to your teams messages as soon as a message pops up you don't have to read it there and then you can continue what you're doing and then come back to it when you're working from home no when to take a break I don't always and the other thing is it's more difficult to understand colleagues workload and pressures when you're not physically seeing them when you're in this environment okay so so I still have a lot to learn but my experience is that hybrid work and the collaboration tools available can help to build good relationships and a better risk pre-decor and underpin successful project leadership and as a final bit on here if I can build a successful COVID-19 test centre without actually setting a foot on campus then you can do anything virtually okay now I'm just going to talk to you slightly about me I'm an introvert okay I have members of my family and some friends who have autistic spectrum disorder and whilst I would not get a diagnosis I have some personality traits that are on that spectrum that's why it's a spectrum it's a sliding scale I also have some personality traits which are slightly on the OCD scale as well okay now OCD at its highest level can be at an absolutely soul destroying illness for people so I'm nowhere near that but I'm incredibly particular I know where everything is in my house to a point that I know which drawer it is in and which part of that drawer it is in okay so whilst those traits that organisation that the danticness helps me be very organised in project management I find building relationships quite exhausting okay because I am an introvert and a lot of the relationship skills I have ask skills that I've learned over the years they are not natural skills so when you see me tonight and I look a bit socially awkward and clumsy and a bit odd it's because I am okay so I'll take any questions I'll go for this gentleman first well it's more of an observation actually on the principles first principle we talked about meetings and giving people terms and the inclusivity we essentially described about half of the thinking environment process of running meetings I don't know whether you're aware of the process of thinking I'm not aware of that process you've essentially described you know half it's not more of the process of how a thinking environment works where everybody's inclusive you start off with that and I spray hitting everybody talking about the breakfast and then you move into the main meat of it and then you give everybody a chance and then you finish off with a praise you give people to say well thanks John for helping me this week solve this problem out and I'm going to invite you to have a look at the thinking environment pretty much doing most of it and honestly very well but there is a framework that's really useful gentleman here has just asked me a question about the synergies with what I've been talking about and a framework called the thinking environment for running meetings both face to face and probably on virtually as well something I've not come across before but I'm going to go and have a look at that and the one thing I would say is that thinking environment if you're doing that on your face to face requires very good chairing okay Microsoft Teams meeting whilst it still should be chaired very well almost naturally encourages that turn taking paradigm it's a strict process that everybody has to follow yeah right thank you Stephen just to turn to the team side of things now you spoke about your view you also spoke about people's backgrounds and getting into their ideas finding out more about what about the etiquette of having cameras on more about those whilst they're being used the small ones that they can be able to get introduced to any of those all those meetings in the larger we seem to have a culture at Huddersfield where everybody puts their camera on okay sometimes people turn it off for a few seconds sometimes people lurk in the background and that's okay I think having the camera on is great because I think you get the visual cues from people if I'm running a virtual training course I specifically request that my learners put their camera on unless they feel dreadfully uncomfortable about doing that because I can get visual cues from them as whether people are engaging about otherwise it feels to me like I'm teaching an empty room so the culture we've got at Huddersfield for the meetings it's not a problem for running online training deliberate I do specifically ask for people to put their cameras on but I won't force people to do it if they feel uncomfortable with that I have one colleague who never puts his camera on I have no idea why I have two questions Just to say thanks for the presentation it's really interesting different from what I was expecting but it feels like what you've shown is the emotional intelligence side to project management Absolutely I have two terms that I'm trying to get everybody to pick up on one is compassionate project management everybody talks about compassionate pedagogy we need to embrace compassionate project management and actually that relationship building and that influencing skills is what makes the difference between a project manager and a project officer the other term that I'm trying to get out there is froleg froleg you're trying to make kind of friends out of your colleagues they're a half colleague, half friend so they're like people who you have really got chats with about what you watched on TV they're not quite into that friend zone where you go out with them for a few drinks and go siping with them at the weekend but if you can make your project team your frolegs you will have a much more successful project implementation first and emotional intelligence absolutely it's kind of interesting because when you look at emotional intelligence and you also look at charisma they're renextricably linked and that sounds a really weird thing to do but go and do some research into charisma and what makes somebody charismatic and then put them against the framework of emotional intelligence and they're pretty much the same thank you all for your engagement, really appreciate it