I’m accountable for servicing and managing the needs and requirements of our Biology Academic office.  This includes exams, timetabling, misconduct etc.  We also run a front office or counter to take enquiries from students and other parties that visit our building.

The part-time makeup of our team has put extra pressure on us to be more aligned and connected.  Often there’s confusion or too much time spent on figuring out where we are up to on a given activity.  Too many daily handover meetings take place, and they take time.  Too many post-it notes to inform us of progress.  Constantly chasing each other for responses and actions.

This has an impact on the quality of our service when we hear Academic staff say ‘I need to speak to Sally as she knows what is going on’

To enable us to ‘self-serve’ progress updates on our activities.  It’s key that our staff can easily pick-up where others left off and be more informed of what others in the team are doing.  This means recording any documents and emails along with progress notes in a visible place where others can:

• continue working on these activities
• leave updates
• ask questions

I want academics to have confidence in all of our staff – we need to provide certainty that we know what’s going on to our stakeholder groups – including visitors and students.

Information comes from all angles (especially vital information that all of our team don’t hear but need to know).  That’s why we need a central hub to feed this information.  We can do this by creating a Microsoft Team, and populating it with channels such as Daily Admin, Staff news, Academic Misconduct, Exam Results, Seminars, Timetables, and Higher Degree Research.

When required, we can forward emails we receive from stakeholders directly into the appropriate channel (using the channel’s email address).  Planner will help us visually track the tasks we have delegated across the team, and OneNote will provide a centralised way to capture organic and unstructured meeting notes.

Am I across what happened yesterday?  What did I miss?  What do I need to know to perform today?

We should also see a reduction in email across our team, as well as a reduction in progress meetings, and sticky note based communication.  There will be greater confidence across the team, and less wondering if ‘so an so did that thing the other day’ — a diminished need to chase for progress updates.