Being kick-ass in a Senior role can’t all be excitement…

Sure you’re leading the team to “break the mould in online post-graduate learning”, but sometimes, just keeping things efficient is what matters to them in crunch week! I’ve been tasked with running the new team meeting on a weekly basis (for our remote global US and UK team), and I think my style may have […]

Group work and the individual

I’ve been fortunate enough to be selected for some great training this month in LEAN and Warwick Uni’s flavour of it, SCD. However a couple of the sessions really highlighted the difference between “working on your own first” or “starting in a group”. When you’re sent off to do a group task on something new, you haven’t […]

Strengths Finder 2.0 – Gallup

Strengths Finder 2.0 – Gallup My Personal Strengths @dancourse > 1 Strategic > 2 Ideation > 3 Relator > 4 Includer > 5 Significance The book, Strengths Finder 2.0 We all like a good personality quiz, c’mon you’ve been tempted by a few Quizzes on your Facebook profile and Buzzfeed right? You hope they may […]

The in-house Entrepeneur

Very pleased to share with you a recent win both of my team’s pitches have achieved in the Santander Digital Innovation Challenge. Warwick Uni is putting some money where it’s mouth is and is sponsoring early stage ideas across the University to improve everyone’s working lives. Both teams I put forward have won a cash prizes, […]

The Lean Startup – joining up the pieces

What a relief to find this book. It’s already beginning to tie up a few concepts I’ve heard over the years and make them form a better picture of what’s been going on in the Tech / Startup industry. The Lean Startup It was Jamie King who mentioned it at Games for Health Conference UK […]

4 simple ways to increase you GitLab CI test speed

Our in-house development projects are well covered for Unit and Frontend tests since we adopted BDD (behat) and a bit of TDD (phpspec). However, creating lots of tests has an impact downstream on our shared Gitlab CI server. Every-time we push a new set of changes to GitLab the tests are taking 30mins to complete and […]

Manual QA #FTW :(

Recently I’ve been looking to improve our app delivery QA. We’ve had to come up with a solution for our team to run the QA. So we got the test plan from them and currently the QA was being run from a spreadsheet… on one person’s machine. So after much chatting with our WMG Team, I lead the […]

Re: “Baking in” SCD…

Planning for Change, some evidence. Here’s a little follow up to my post, “Baking in” SCD. I’ve been forwarded this link which is exceptional in it’s brevity and information. I suggest anyone in HE should read it’s from the, “Leadership foundation for Higher Education” and is called, “Adaptive capability in higher education institutions“. It looks at […]

We’re ignoring our stakeholders and they couldn’t be happier!

The following is a set of techniques that at WMG, Warwick University I have led and implemented on various digital projects to great success. Stakeholders are happy with it, and they’re not inadvertently altering the success chance of the projects. You’ll recognise this. Every project you run, has a plethora of stakeholders involved. In some large […]

“Baking in” SCD tools to our staff’s daily appetite

Recently I started scratching the surface of SCD here at Warwick University by reading a couple of online resources. Then last week I planned to and meet some of the core team. The chats we had introduced some really interesting new discussions and concepts to me around change programmes. SCD is a massive change programme […]