Student Services

Business transformation using scrum

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‘Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one’

Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

My mission for 2018 has been to take on the leadership of a bunch of new teams in the wake of a major restructure, and to get them up and running in a completely new service model, delivering the potential efficiencies that the new structure affords – and it’s been a doozy. This post in no way flags the end of the mission, if anything it is a minor pause in the conversation to reflect on where we’re at now, and consider one possible way of moving ahead – scrum.

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Farewelling my smartwatch – a tale of data value

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I stopped wearing my smartwatch this week.

Or, to be more accurate, I stopped wearing the latest smartwatch that I have been wearing. I started off with a Fitbit Charge HR (arguably not a smartwatch, I’ll give you that) until that fell to pieces, then moved on to a Sony Smartwatch 3, and then had a brief dalliance with a borrowed Ticwatch S. They now all sit abandoned while I toy with the idea of putting them on eBay, taking them to bits or strapping them to the dog while I’m at work to see just how active he isn’t during the day (greyhounds are good like that).

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My writer’s block (aka Life at Flinders – three years on)

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Roadblock - https://flic.kr/p/fxFVgnI’ve really struggled to write for the last six months. Whilst looking at my blog from an outsiders perspective there’s a big gap between this post and the last one way back in September, what you don’t see is the handful of post ‘stubs’ that will probably forever remain unpublished that sit in my WordPress drafts, nor do you see the flickers of ideas that have popped into my head that have never even made it that far. This post attempts to understand why – and how it relates to my third year at Flinders.

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Students as partners – moving beyond the customer concept in student services

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University Life 102The debate of whether students are or are not ‘customers’ of their University is a well worn one, so it was of great interest to see this report published today via Universities UK which put the matter to rest once and for all, and the result was…

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The Student Services conundrum: Part 3 – graduate outcomes and the (potential) role of the service centre

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20151002_162309In the first two posts of this trilogy I discussed the background of the Flinders Connect student service centre and a strategy for driving the highest value from a combination of online self-service, service centre support, and more focused interactions. In this final post, I want to explore something which sets the University context apart from that of (say) a bank, a telco or a government department.

That something is one of the goals of of all Universities: to develop strong graduate capabilities within students as a fundamental outcome of attending University.

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