Update on Professional Services restructure

As it has been almost 12 months since the School successfully secured a significant investment from the University to progress the restructure of the Professional Services Team, I thought it would be useful to provide a personal reflection on where we now. There have been numerous difficulties and challenges over the past 12 months but there have also been a significant number of positive developments that have been crucial in supporting the School’s strategic ambitions to be ranked in the top 10 nationally and the top 50 internationally by 2017.

Implementing the new structure was delayed as a result of me being out of action with pneumonia for around 7 weeks between July and September 2013. However, this did mean that we extended the consultation period and allowed further opportunities for input into how the team should look. The accompanying voluntary severance scheme also allowed colleagues who did not want to be part of the new structure to make plans away from the University. This time was also critical in re-writing the job descriptions of those staff that were put ‘at risk’. As a result of this we now have the much-needed consistency across cognate roles and allows us the opportunity to provide a considerably more flexible, professional and dynamic service to the School and our students, clients and academic staff.

I have personally spent a considerable amount of time progressing the 21 new posts that are being added to the Team between August 2013 and January 2015. Most of the JDs for these new roles have now been written in at least draft form and the next roles to progress to advert will include the Student Engagement Manager (AR6), Facilities Assistant (Band 400), Events Co-ordinator (Band 400/500), Employability Co-ordinator (Band 500) and the Deputy Operations Manager (AR8). The College are also currently planning the recruitment for the 2 Marketing Officer roles (AR6 and AR7). The next 6 weeks will also see us interviewing for the additional UG Placements Officer, Head of External Relations and 2 School Hub Assistants. We are thus making steady and tangible progress on filling the roles that have been highlighted as crucial to the School via the PSR.

Along with other senior staff in the School I have also invested a significant amount of time in recruitment activity to both new posts and vacated established posts. The demand to work at Birmingham Business School is significant with over 120 people per vacancy regularly making strong applications to work here. It has made shortlisting and interviewing a very difficult process! We are soon to welcome Tripp Martin from Aston Business School (Head of Careers in Business), Alison Bullers from Warwick Business School (MBA Deputy Director) and Miriam Nicholson from Birmingham City University (KPMG Programme Administrator) and I know that we will all warmly welcome them when they join us.

Over the past 12 months a number of professional services staff have worked extremely hard to help the School with the AACSB accreditation – a process that had taken over 5 years to get to the final panel visit which occurred in February 2014. It will be a tremendous achievement to obtain the ‘triple crown’ of AMBA, EQUIS and AACSB and we must not under estimate the role that professional services played in supporting such a strategically significant event. All staff will be told the final decision as soon as possible. We are expecting to hear the official verdict in May 2014.

The above are just a few highlights – there have been many more. I hope you can see that we are well on the way to getting all roles filled with high calibre and motivated staff who are committed to working in the Birmingham Business School.

What about the priorities for the next 12 months? I won’t go into chapter and verse here but the following are some of the main ‘headline’ priorities.

As a diverse and growing team of professionals, we need to communicate better than we do now. My direct reports and I now meet monthly through the ‘Professional Services Leadership Group’ which is the forum through which I convey the main issues from College and SMT and senior managers provide updates on their areas of activity. The next step is for each team within the structure to define its own schedule of team meetings so that we can share information and solve operational problems quickly as they arise and plan more proactively for the future. If you have any thoughts or ideas on how this could work, please do let your immediate line manager know. We need the flow of information to be 2 way so that every layer of the structure has access to the right information and at the right time.

Secondly, we also need to focus on our core business processes so that we can really deliver on providing a flexible and robust service at all times and colleagues working in the largest single team (programme support under Louise Fearn) are likely to be the first group to really make progress in this area. These reviews will focus on defining a consistent way of working across all areas of the School and the initiative has the full and unconditional support from SMT. Inevitably this will mean that we all end up doing some things differently in the future.

Related to the need to have more consistency we need to drastically reduce our reliance on agency staff. Over the past 4 years or so we have spent £00000’s each year and this is clearly not sustainable. As we get closer to full establishment and obtain more consistency we will naturally get more capacity to service temporary shortfalls in staffing and/or temporary increases in workload. To help with this, line managers will be spending more time working with teams on forward planning activities so that we will have a much clearer idea on the workload of each team at any given point in time. We are already making positive in-roads here and we are now ‘temp free’.

We will also be addressing the issues that were highlighted in the 2013 Staff Survey and an action plan at School-level and for the School’s PST will be put in place. You will all get to see this as and when it is finalised. However, what do you think would help us address the issues that came out? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on how we can provide solutions to any of the highlighted issues.

There will of course be other priorities that will need our professional and collective efforts and these will be communicated in due course. However, if you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions about ANYTHING to do with improving how the team or the School works, please let me or your line manager know. I will be putting informal ‘drop in’ times in my diary so please do use them – Deb Long will send something out about this soon.

Finally, I need to thank everyone in the team for your continued determination and professionalism to make Birmingham Business School a great place. We all have a very bright future and we all have a real part to play in ensuring that we go from strength to strength. Thank you.

Ian Hamley