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Description
Session Description
This session will outline the unique agile processes that the Jisc and HESA Business Intelligence project put in place to deliver a national business intelligence service for the higher education sector and outline the benefits of using agile as a collaboration approach with newly formed teams working on complex issues aiming to deliver most value within a short time.
The Business Intelligence project enables higher education institutions to use a series of dashboards to review comparative data from a number of sources, compare their performance with peer organisations and identify trends and gain insights. The dashboards were developed through a series of analytics labs made up of HE professionals with the most promising ones published through HESA’s Heidi Plus service.
This session will talk about the benefits of using agile approaches for cross-institutional collaboration and delivering value in a short space of time during the analytics lab part of the project. As a previous member of the project team I would like to cover the aspects of why agile was successful and how its principles can be adopted in institutions to support complex projects to ensure delivery at a sustainable pace within an environment where there is enough “method” for everyone to collaborate and sufficient space for creativity and innovation in the work.
Session content: evaluation and reflection
The session is based on the Jisc Research and Development Business Intelligence project which is working in partnership with HESA to deliver a national business intelligence service for the higher education sector. Part of the project is the Analytics Labs service which is an expert mentoring and coaching programme, which offers a unique continuing professional development (CPD) opportunity for higher education. The participants are coached in creating a rage of dashboards. The most appropriate dashboards created by participants are first released to the sector in beta form. The best are selected before being developed fully into community dashboards. The initiative has engaged 246 staff from 95 universities to date, delivering data derived insights to improve the whole of UK higher education, from student recruitment, graduate employability, course provision, staffing, estates, research, finance and much more. The project which has now transitioned into a service has been recently been shortlisted for the 2018 National Technology Awards.
I will base the session on my observations from working as a Scrum Master during two iterations of the project the Heidi Lab and Library data lab (autumn 2016) which included the agile process design and working with teams to coach them in the agile practices; the observations of my Jisc colleagues continuing the work on the project (2017 up to now); and testimonials from the participants on the project.
References
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/business-intelligence-project
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/jisc-and-hesa-analytics-project-in-the-running-for-a-national-technology-award-22-mar-2018
Resources for participants
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/business-intelligence-project
Martin Hawksey posted an update in the session Cross-institutional collaboration made easy with agile [18-116] – CANCELLED 8 months, 3 weeks ago
Regrettably the author of this sessions has had to pull out from the conference
