Lean HE Ireland Update – the 23 June 2021 event

By Michael Sinnott, Director, UCD Agile and Network Lead of Lean HE Ireland

We had a great session on 23 June 2021 for the inaugural Lean HE Ireland event with over 90 attendees from across the seven institutions – UCC, DCU, UL, QUB, TU Dublin, University of Ulster, and UCD – including 20 from UCD.

The theme of “Starting, Connecting, Sharing” speaks for itself.  As a Work Smarter Together reader you will already know Lean, and the broad ‘making things better’ impulse it refers to, is not new to UCD but the connecting and sharing remains a challenge.  As with Lean HE Ireland, connecting and sharing is very much down to you – you, and people like you, reaching out, making the connection, sharing experiences and challenges.  Check the links below for more.

We had contributions from Olga Murdoch (UCD), Michael Daly (QUB), and Matthew Semple (DCU) on different aspects of Lean in their organisations, as well as input from with Michelle Nelson (UCC) and Michael Sinnott (UCD) on Lean HE itself and touching on service design, the connection between project and change management, and various ways bringing Lean to bear.  The goal, remember, was to help folks thing about starting, so we wanted to sketch the landscape rather than go into detail.  Be sure to contact us in UCD Agile  if you have something you want to explore.

This was a great first effort for all of those who contributed and attended!!  The bar set high.  Hopes were raised.  Energy is there to be tapped.

If you are interested in more:

• You can get a PDF of the presentations here.
• The following link has the video of the session, including timestamps to let to jump to the various segments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf0g8TAWW6c
• We got a 50% response rate to the survey (really good – thanks) with an overall rating, for those of you who like metrics, of 4.68 (out of 5).  Lots of content for us to digest from the responses so we’ll get back to you on that soon.
• Feel free to use the ideas in the session but if you are thinking of quoting one of the stories, check with the presenter first. 

The session came out of the Lean HE Ireland network group meeting on 11 March 2021, after our panel discussion on ‘Different Ways of Doing Lean’.  (Check this link for that very interesting discussion on the approaches to Lean – https://worksmartertogether.ucd.ie/lean-he-ireland-update/).

We had 130 folks sign up for the event through Eventbrite and 90 join us on the day.  That’s a massive response given how busy folks always are and how easy it is for the day to day to beat ‘good intentions’ on a given day.

And the idea behind it all is… networks… international, regional, in your own institution, between institutions on topics… within the institution on topics. 

If you would like to explore this further contact Michael or Josephine in UCD – see the list below for emails.

See you at the next Lean HE Ireland event.  And remember, connecting and sharing is down to you!

Michael

The Lean HE Ireland network:

What is Lean HE Ireland?

Lean HE Ireland is a network currently involving colleagues from UCC, DCU, UL, QUB, TU Dublin, University of Ulster, and UCD – the kind of people who might saw “we are trying to make things better here… I wonder how you do it there”.  We are part of the Lean HE Europe regional grouping, which includes local networks from UK Scotland, UK North and Midlands, UK South, Poland, Netherlands and Belgium, and Nordic, with an emerging network in France.  And Lean HE Europe is part of Lean HE (https://www.leanhe.org/home), a network which includes Lean HE Americas and Lean HE Asia Pacific.