Transcript:

Acting Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Elborn:

You are at the heart of all that we do at Queen’s and are the key drivers of our success. You told us during Strategy 2030 development that we needed to reduce administrative workload by re-designing processes, stream-lining decision-making, and adopting digital technologies to create more time to invest effort in our core activities of teaching, research, and our staff and student experience. To enable us to do this, we have three key projects which are being led by myself and Sharon Jones, Interim Director of Transformation and Strategy.

The first project is to build our own internal capability to deliver projects, of which there are many emerging from Strategy 2030. This includes our ability to prioritise work, coordinate projects across the university whilst ensuring that they are properly resourced, and that we successfully achieve project outcomes and benefits. PA Consulting are supporting us with this work and the key outputs will be as follows: updated 2030 delivery plans for Faculties and Professional Services and the establishment of a new internal Project Management and Change Office to support the programme delivery across the University in a coordinated and consistent way.

The second project, delivered with the support of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is aimed at helping us to review ways of working across Queen’s professional services and identifying opportunities for flexibility and agility in delivering our services, through collaboration between professional services and academic colleagues. PwC is currently developing an activity analysis which will form a questionnaire. The data collected from this questionnaire will help us better understand the work carried out by professional services colleagues across the institution. This will provide insight on how we work together and help us focus even more on the activity that really matters in the delivery of Strategy 2030. The output will also help us to identify areas that are working well, and also opportunities to make improvements that will make a positive difference in how we work together. The recommendations will also provide a foundation upon which we can embed the Staff Charter and the behaviours we all recognise are needed to capitalise on our strengths.

The third project is a financial benchmarking. The aim of this project is to help us understand our income and costs. Tribal has been engaged to support this work and they will provide benchmarking data from similar institutions. The key outputs from this work will be an analysis of how finance is generated and distributed across our various tasks and how this compares to other HEIs (Higher Education Institutions). Moving forward this information will help us plan and allocate resources for the future.

This programme of work will enable us to focus our people and resources on the activities aligned to the delivery of our ambitions. It is also about enabling the delivery of our priorities in a coordinated and structured way, making it easier to measure the success of what we do. In doing this we will create more time to invest in our core activities of teaching, research, improving the staff and student experience and continuing to build our reputation as a great place to work and study.

The University Management Board have endorsed this programme of work and it will be led by myself and Sharon Jones, with the support of our Pro-Vice Chancellors and Chief Officers with their Faculty and Directorate teams.

I hope that you welcome this approach, and we will continue to engage with and update you as this work progresses. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you in this exciting transformation that we’re bringing to how we work at Queen’s.