WST 2019 – Registration and news
Registration is now closed for Work Smarter Together 2019 (WST 2019).
Welcome to your connection point for WST 2019. Check back here for news and updates, with more info on the main WST 2019 event page here.
14 March – The Main Event: Click here for more details.
13 March – The Pre-Event Workshops: Click here for more details.
News and Updates
March 13 News – WST 2019 is now live
Work Smarter Together 2019 started at 1.30pm on March 13 with opening of the poster exhibition to the public at lunch time on Wednesday 2019. WST 2019 is up and running!
The pre-event workshops are taking place today and so we wish our colleagues involved in those sessions a very fruitful time.
Pick up your name badges on Thursday from 9.30 in the Student Centre atrium.
If you are joining us at WST 2019 four key things to remember
- Get to your sessions on time
- Bring a phone/tablet as many of the sessions are looking for participation through apps like Slido and Cahoot
- Vote for your favourite poster
- Be sure to tweet your enthusiasm for what you find interesting in the sessions, or your favourite poster, using #WST2019 – it is a great way to share and connect.
See you tomorrow.
March 12 News – Registration closes 12 March – final preparations in hand
We have reached the ‘last minute’ – preparations are coming to a climax. The pre-event sessions start tomorrow – still a few places left if you have not checked out the programme of workshops – registration closes at 3pm 12 March. 
Final numbers for catering and seating are being taken now, the posters are ready to be hung on Wednesday, the folks doing the breakout sessions are finalising the timing of their presentations, the seating is being arranged, the food prepared…
WST itself is an example of collaboration and creativity in UCD – colleagues working together for a common cause, shaping and delivering a great day. Over 80 people will have been involved in bringing WST 2019 to UCD. This includes all the poster developers, the session presenters, the session chairs and session buddies, registration team, Student Centre staff, the logistics people, the presenters of the poster and presentation preparation workshops, the Event Planning Group, the photographers, the ushers on the day…
This is one of those lists it is risky to start for fear of leaving someone or a group out. The underlying theme of Work Smarter Together is ‘celebrating collaboration and creativity’ so what we will get on Thursday is indeed a celebration of the energy and enthusiasm which drives UCD forward, and a chance to be drawn into WST 2019’s focus – ‘Our people, shaping a better future’.
Two key things to remember at WST 2019 on Thursday – vote for your favourite poster in the poster competition and bring a phone/tablet as five of the sessions are using online stuff for engaging with their audiences. And you will need your devices to tweet furiously.
And the last thing to remember – come along, connect with colleagues, take part in great sessions, and enjoy yourselves.
March 8 News – Last minute registrations
Sessions filling – register now
#WST2019 is close now, with the event is filling up and some of the breakout sessions already at capacity, alas. Be sure to secure your place if you have not already registered. 
We have a great day lined up for you. Manley Hopkinson was with us on Wednesday, making final preparations, getting an update on the overall event, seeing the Astra Hall for the first time. We’ll be sitting in the round for the plenary sessions so that will create a dynamic all of its own around how Manley and Aine McCleary, our other guest speaker, connect with the audience. (Check here for more on Manley and Aine).
We have 28 speakers across eight sessions. The keynotes will pick up on the overall theme – ‘our people, shaping a better future’ – from their unique perspectives, providing a broad context for the day. You should check here for the bios and session details – you will get a better sense of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ for what you will find in the breakout sessions.
And don’t forget to look at the pre-event sessions, all of which are workshop based and provide a broader opportunity to meet and work with colleagues from across the campus in your choice of one of the five areas available. Check here for more details.
See you on the 14th.
March 5 News – WST 2019 choices, choices
You’ve choices to make at #WST2019 – 4 roads to collaboration, 3 strands to local staff development, 2 sessions, 1 time slot. You choose… which of the afternoon sessions you’ll attend.
UCD often shows itself at its best when folks come together out of mutual interest in order to explore and develop big goals. These two sessions show different ways and different context in which we do this here in UCD.
On the four roads to collaboration, how do you bring people together and spark and sustain collaboration, collaboration out of need, collaboration because it is a good idea, collaboration because of the ‘coming together’? Lots of reasons, lots of ways, lots of challenges – four roads already traveled by the presenters, sharing their experience in this session (B2 – afternoon).
With the three approaches to empowering people through local development initiatives, how do folks spark with, and grow with, and sustain their colleagues? The University provides lots of supports… but how do you use them when responding to your own local environment with your own colleagues? In this session (B1 – afternoon) the presenters will talk about the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘to where?’ of what they have been doing.
Two sessions. You choose.
And then, of course, there is session B3 – “UCD Green Week 2019: helping to turn big ideas into on-going action”. This is looking at what UCD Green Week involved, in terms of mobilising and acting, but the session also extends the conversation into the general one – how do you take a big, overwhelming issue and enable people to do something practical and tangible, how do you find the energy not to be overwhelmed?
So… three sessions. You choose. (Nobody said this was going to be easy!) Check here for more on the WST 2019 afternoon sessions.
March 1 News
We have 5 per-event sessions on March 13, a great opportunity for you to come together with some colleagues from across the campus in workshop mode – the chance to go deeper into some areas. Check here for more details on the sessions.
One of the sessions asks whey asking ‘why?’ put you in touch with a great energy you already have. The session is called Finding your “WHY” – What is a WHY Statement and how can it help you and your team?
Jeremy Britton and Amy McDonald are bringing their experience as the Unified Support Model (USM) rollout team, a project which is very closely aligned with the WST theme for 2019 – ‘our people, shaping a better future’. They work with colleagues in various student administration support areas in developing how we deliver those supports to our students.
What about the USM itself? The USM’s WHY is To build partnerships so that together we can achieve more
This interactive workshop will introduce you to the concept of WHY – a person or a team’s underlying purpose, cause or belief. Together, you’ll will take a look at the exercises used to help (re)discover a team’s WHY and spend a bit of time discussing why anyone should care… and then, when we know the ‘why’ and the ‘why we care’, how do the answers provide a power and energy in shaping the future.
Join them at their pre-event session on March 13th and take the first steps in discovering your WHY. Register here.
February 27 News
There is a WST 2019 reminder going out in the eZine today – 14 March is getting close! – and, given you are reading this, you already know about the event so be sure to highlight it for your colleagues, check the tweets from @UCDWorkSmart and look out for the #WST2019 hashtag. 
You’ve got the links for registering at the top of this page so be sure to join us for WST 2019.
We’ve two great speakers – Manley Hopkinson and Aine McCleary (check here for more WST details or get Google to tell you more about them) – as well as six breakout sessions , the poster exhibition and the pre-event workshops on March 13. Apart from all this great content, the day is a chance to meet colleagues from across the campus.
The theme of the event is ‘Our people, shaping a better future’ so we have a big focus on what we’ve done, what we do, and what we can do, in shaping that future, continuing to work with the collaboration and creativity that has created all the great things in UCD.
Register now!
February 25 News
Session highlight: Faculty-Staff-Student Partnership
Two of our academic colleagues from the College of Social Sciences and Law (CSSL) are taking the WST 2019 theme of ‘our people, shaping a better future’ and shining its light on their College’s ‘students as partners’ approach.
Niamh Moore-Cherry, Associate Professor in Urban Governance and Development in the UCD School of Geography and Vice-Principal for Teaching and Learning in the College of Social Sciences and Law, and Sara O’Sullivan, Associate Professor in UCD School of Sociology and Associate Dean for Social Sciences, will bring their audience into a discussion on how partnership approaches can benefit all of the partners in the university community. In CSSL over the last eighteen months the ‘students as partners’ approach has enabled students, faculty and staff to collaborate on a range of academic and support projects, shaping an inclusive and ‘fit for purpose’ future. Fit for what purpose? The creation of a collaborative, innovative community in which education and research reinforce each other, connecting students, faculty, staff and those beyond the immediate UCD community.
This all sounds great… but how have they gone about this, what has been happening, how are we learning about what ‘students as partners’ means, about how to shape our better future? Come along to this session and see.
Click here to begin your registration. Use the ‘Work Smarter Together 2019’ menu item for more links.
February 22 news from the WST 2019 preparations front.
The poster folks submitted their work on 21 February. With CopiPrint as our printing partners, and with the Bursar’s Office sponsoring poster production, printing starts next week. Lots of other work too. The Student Centre is embracing its role as venue for WST 2019 and so we are busy working with them on shaping a great day for you.
The folks involved in the six breakout sessions are very busy with preparations. Four of the sessions have strands within them – individual contributions to the overall theme – and shaping these for a 50 minute session is like planning a sequence of connected Ted talks. No pressure, then, on the presenters… with ‘presenters’ being some your colleagues from across the campus. Each of these sessions will have a session host to chair the conversation at the end and in some of them we will use Slido to make audience interaction – your interaction – easier. The other two sessions are more straight forward in structure but also make your connecting with the session a key part of how they are running the sessions.
You can read more here on our two guest speakers – Manley Hopkinson and Aine McCleary – but both sessions, in different ways and formats, are also going to look at connecting with people and giving voice. The breakout sessions are being framed in this way too, all of these elements echoing the theme for the day – ‘our people, shaping a better future’. At the heart of this is the idea of giving ‘voice’ – speaking and being heard, taking an active part in shaping. How do we create connections, support one another, become more together than we are apart – on whatever scale you think about – except through speaking and being heard? Voice.
Empowerment comes into this. Encouragement. Being supported. And I think there is an element of subversion too… I just Googled what ‘subversion’ means: “the undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution”. I’m thinking more of ‘subversion’ with a small s – the effect of creativity and empowerment and ‘voice’. The radio this morning is full of the “two out of five jobs at high risk of automation” news, news likely to rattle around noisily for a short while and fade… and yet this is the kind of future coming our way. How do we shape it, how to we find the energy and encouragement to navigate change, how do we make better a future we cannot now imagine? ‘Our people, shaping a better future’.
This update from: Michael Sinnott, WST 2019 Event Group.
More on WST 2019 – from 13 February
Click here Click on the for an overview of WST 2019.
Click here to see the main event programme.
Click here to see what sessions are running in the pre-event programme.
Quick sketch of the WST 2019 event
On the day itself you’ll get to benefit from the work of more than 50 colleagues from across the UCD campus who are currently in the last stages of finalising their content for the day, bringing us two sets of breakout sessions from which you can pick what you connect with, as will as a poster exhibition with over 30 contributors.
And of course we will have our keynote session with Manley Hopkinson and a plenary session with Aine McCleary.
The theme for the day is “Our people, shaping a better future” so, as with all Work Smarter Together events, the focus will be on the creativity and collaboration which we bring to shaping UCD. The WST events are always an opportunity to come together and meet colleagues from across the campus and we’re putting a particular emphasis on making sure the individual sessions create opportunity for questioning and talking, as well as listening and learning… shaping the future…
We will run a number of pre-event sessions on 13 March. These focus on work shopping and give the opportunity to get into more involved work, in smaller groups, on some of the topics coming up. Registration for the March 13 pre-event sessions will open on Friday 15 February.
There are more details on the main WST 2019 event page here.
This update from: The WST Event Group
Andrew Myler (Registry), Caroline McTeigue (Registry), Ciaran Bennet (Estates), Santiago Astorga (Estates), Dipti Pandya (Research Administration), Jason Masterson (Student Services), Andy Taylor (Student Centre), Lorna Bailey (Student Centre), Michael Sinnott (UCD Agile), Helen Kenny (School of Economics), Olga Murdoch (UCD Agile), Mark Simpson (Human Resources), Paul Fitzgerald (Human Resources), Marie Burke (Library), Allan Maguire (Finance Office), Paul Barry (IT Services), Michelle Latimer (Library)
