Effective digital transformation requires colleagues from right across a college to come together. Building those bridges is not always an easy thing to achieve.
Over the last few months we’ve been speaking to professionals in IT, teaching and learning-related roles in FE organisations. We want to identify the conditions where effective cooperation on day to day business and collaboration on special projects can flourish.
My colleague Glyn wrote about his reflections recently and I wanted to follow up with some insights about how we’re starting to analyse the information we’re gathering. I think it gives us a good basis for building support and guidance for our member organisations.
We’ve talked to individuals and focus groups asking them about examples of when cross-team cooperation and collaboration have been most successful and the barriers they regularly encounter.
What they said breaks down reasonably neatly into the following success factors. I’ve followed Glyn’s example and provided some imagined scenarios for illustration, based on some of the things we learned.
Breaking down the success factors
Shared vision & purpose
Establish common ground for cooperation around shared goals
- Outcome focus, not role focus
- Strategic alignment
- Addressing competing priorities
Imagined scenario: strategic planning of teaching and learning is worked out at the highest level involving senior representation from all the different functions and services involved as equal partners. The strategy has a clear set of messages and principles and these form the basis of all interdepartmental cooperation. Where there is tension between operational aims, strategic leads are able to step back and question how they can best reach a solution that moves them towards fulfilling the strategic aims.
Resources & environment
Providing the tools and organisational conditions that enable effective cooperation
- Time
- Prioritization
- Budget
- Tools and infrastructure
Imagined scenario: Faced with the need to renew key pieces of digital equipment such as teachers’ laptops, a new IT manager takes the opportunity to work closely with teaching staff to identify non -standard equipment needed to meet current requirements and likely future needs. Using this information and partnering with the vice principal for teaching and learning, they successfully lobby for additional funding for higher spec devices. This reduced the maintenance burden on the IT team allowing them to deliver a much more responsive service, and reduced costs for the organisation in the longer term.
Motivation and mindset
Factors affecting how individuals feel about working together and how they think about what they are working on
- Negotiating
- Empowering people
- Celebrating success
- Aligning with personal goals
Imagined scenario: Keen to foster a creative mindset among teaching staff and develop the creative use of technology the head of quality at one college partnered with the head of IT to instigate a termly award programme for small projects that demonstrated creative thought and demonstrable impact on the student experience. The best examples are showcased across the college to inspire others. One of the key criteria was that all projects had to include a named partner on the IT team who also shared in the kudos.
People & roles
People have the knowledge, skills, awareness and empathy to cooperate and collaborate effectively
- Have the right people in the right room
- Breadth of knowledge
- Diplomacy and professional courtesy
- Positions people occupy – hybrid bridging roles (see below)
Imagined scenario: Sometimes the “right people in the right room” point can be taken literally. One college works to break up departmental silos by bringing together the leadership of IT services, teaching quality and learning technology into the same open plan office space. Their teams are still nearby but the leaders find that the proximity and visibility of their key colleagues made informal conversations much easier. Co-location builds understanding, makes some problems quicker to solve and encourages creative thinking.
Communication
Factors influencing how well information and knowledge are shared between individuals and teams.
- Transparency
- Consistency and clarity
- Geographical proximity
- Progress updates
Imagined scenario: After achieving ISO27001 certification, the IT manager identifies an increase in dissatisfaction with her team’s service. She works out that a lot of this was down to the IT team being perceived as a “blocker” that says no to the majority of requests for new types of software from teaching staff. Through attending department meetings and day to day interactions, she and her team explain the risks to them and their students from cyber-attack and data loss, using real life examples of other organisations. They also created guidance for teaching staff to help them assess potential data risks from online tools they might consider using.
Some reflections
Causes and symptoms
Problems may present themselves as one thing but the root cause may be something else. Tackling an issue of poor relationships by focusing on things like empathy building and interpersonal skills might be helpful, but if the root cause of the problem is broken systems or poorly designed processes then the issues will persist, perhaps in a different form.
Be curious and follow issues upstream by asking constructive questions and allowing people to tell their story.
Mergers
A few of our respondents noted that, as their college had gone through mergers and grown in geographical spread, there had been a deterioration in communication between staff in different departments. Amalgamation and merger are an established part of the FE landscape in the UK in response to financial realities. That comes with the challenge of leaders being spread too thinly across a larger organisation to know what different people are experiencing and making sure that some individuals, roles and services don’t get marginalised.
The importance of the bridging roles
There is often lack of mutual understanding of roles across organisations. For example, some teachers may not understand why it’s important to log a support ticket when a piece of classroom equipment fails, rather than just “popping round and having a chat” And some IT staff may not fully appreciate the impact of a failing piece of equipment on a carefully planned session with a full classroom.
What can be very powerful is the involvement of roles that bridge traditionally separate functions. Learning technologists and library managers are a great example as they often have sound knowledge of IT systems as well as a deep understanding of the realities of classroom life. They can be natural interpreters and mediators.
Natural tension
It might be tempting to wish for a working environment free from tension, but I’m not sure that’s the best outcome. Tension between different functions with different priorities is inevitable and can be healthy.
You can’t build a bridge without tension. It’s the thing that holds it up! Without it, you just have a pile of raw materials on the ground. The key is knowing where the creative tensions should be and keeping them in balance.
Moving forward
What do you think? Does our thinking match your own experiences of good (and less good!) cooperation and collaboration with colleagues. We’re planning further work on this so if you’d like to be involved in sharing your experiences, let us know in the comments or by emailing adviceteam@jisc.ac.uk.
Photo by Andy Fotheringham
