Discover and share good practice for smarter working universities

A guide to evidencing the benefits of business process improvement – University of Strathclyde

This guide describes how higher education institutions can evidence benefits of business process improvement. It outlines how to quantify benefits throughout a typical project life-cycle for process redesign / process modelling activities and demonstrates how to gather, record and communicate the information to allow for more accurate reporting of a project's impact.

Academic Career Frameworks: Key to Change?

Bournemouth University’s new career frameworks for academics are the subject of a longitudinal study funded by the Innovation and Transformation Fund. Here is a report from 2015 setting out the findings gathered to date.

Participative Process Review – toolkit

The process reviews developed by Oxford Brookes have been specifically designed to enable teams to subsequently self-facilitate further reviews. This toolkit introduces the concept of carrying out process reviews to professionals working in higher education.

The P3 Project – People, Performance and Process, Bangor University

A project to bring the questions of people and performance together with lean methodologies has been developed by the Aber-Bangor Strategic Alliance with funding from the Innovation and Transformation Fund.

Hefce funds HE Shared Legal VAT cost sharing group project

HE Shared Legal – until recently, a HEFCE-funded pilot project - has made a successful application for a portion of the grant funding offered by HEFCE last year in relation to VAT cost sharing group projects.

£14.8m cash efficiency savings for NEUPC members

Following the publication of the North Eastern Universities Purchasing Consortium’s (NEUPC) annual report, Maria Langham describes the consortium’s recent achievements and how it plans to support universities in their mission to deliver world-class education in the future.

Shared services – Out of Hours Helpline – case study – June 2015

A subscription-based, shared service providing first and second line support with IT and library queries to students and staff.

HE Shared Legal – the new shared legal service for UK higher education

HE Shared Legal, the new national shared legal service for the UK higher education sector, is a pilot project borne out of a HEFCE and JISC Advance backed feasibility study conducted in 2010. Since the service was launched on 1 May 2012, it has gained eleven HE subscriber institutions, published more than 170 items of generic guidance, and attended to over 85 individual legal enquiries.

Schools Planning Framework for Academic Leaders

The Schools Planning Framework project funded by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, seeks to explore the development of a practical application of a performance management tool, aimed at academic units. The report sets out the findings of the project as a case study based at the University of Lincoln.

Putting Students at the Heart of Our Processes – University of Leicester

This report is a guide to the University of Leicester's exploration into whether connecting senior leaders more closely to the student experience created an impetus for organisational improvement. It contains information on “what works” in engaging senior leaders and seeks to provide insights for institutions looking to develop similar approaches.