Feeling overwhelmed by the ever-growing demands of your role?

Good intentions to build in regular planning, prioritisation, and reflection not materialising?

You're not alone. Universities are busy, complicated places, and juggling delivery, changing expectations, teams and stakeholders, can leave us feeling stretched thin.

HE Co-Lab is our unique pilot programme of guided, virtual co-working sessions designed specifically for busy digital professionals and leaders working in Higher Education. 

This first HE Co-Lab will support you to create a lean roadmap for Q1 of the next academic financial year (Aug - Oct 2024), ready to share with stakeholders. And includes reflective Week Notes writing sessions each week, and a review session half way through the quarter. 

What you'll gain:

• Space to reflect on what's working: Increase your productivity and efficiency. Feel less overwhelmed. Manage stakeholder expectations.

• Master Prioritisation: Utilise effective strategies to identify and focus on the most critical tasks, ensuring your time is spent where it matters most.

• Develop Lean Strategic Plans: Use tools and time to create clear, actionable plans for your work, aligning your work with institutional goals.

• Foster Agile Communications: Share plans and progress in real time to build trust and reputation.

• Boost Productivity & Well-being: Gain valuable insights and tools to streamline your workflow and reduce stress.

• Develop sustainable habits of reflection, prioritisation, planning and communications.

HE Co-Lab Planning Programme overview:

Reflect & Prioritise
Tuesday 2nd July, 10.30am - 12.30pm
- Retro: Identify what's working well or blocking progress. And what you need to do about it.
- Connect your list of "could dos" with your team and organisation's strategic objectives.
- Prioritise to shape your potential activities.

Plan & Communicate
Tuesday  9th July,  10.30am - 12.30pm
- Turn your "could dos" into OKRs and a Lean Roadmap for the next 3 months.
- Plan what needs to happen, and how to kickstart your activity.
- Plan how to communicate your priorities and thinking to stakeholders using appropriate channels, in order to inform and engage.

Halfway Review & Re-prioritise
Tuesday 10th September, 11.30am-12.30pm
- 6 weeks into the quarter, you'll review your Roadmap to identify what's working, what's not, and why.
- Update your Roadmap to consider changes to resource and expectations, and keep you and your team on track.
- Communicate and celebrate progress, and manage stakeholder expectations through professional communications.

Week Notes Co-writing
Weekly sessions, every Friday 11.30-12.30
- Guided reflection on progress, learning, and things that need some thinking time.
- Turn your reflection into published blog posts, Week Notes, and communications for stakeholders. 

Each guided, virtual, co-working session inlcudes:

• Email reminders ahead of the session, with links to help you prep (optional - all work can take place in the sessions if you're short on time, and who isn't?!)

• Templates and tools shared on Miro to support your thinking, formatting and sharing of the outcome of this activity. We'll also suggest the tactical use of AI tools to speed up the process.

• Guidance and support from Rhiannon Davies, a digital team leader with experience from HE, third and public sectors over the last 15 years. 

• Prompts, focused time and accountability - our mantra (and Cheryl Sandberg's) is "done is better than perfect", and our goal is for you to have something to "ship" at the end of each session. You could spend time refining your work after the sessions, but we believe there's diminishing returns and perfection can be a blocker to delivery.

How much does the programme cost?

For this quarter:

• £300 

• A total of 17 hours (which works out as an average of 1.3 hours per week across the quarter) of your time.