(Re)Evaluating Remit in the New Normal

By Amy McDonald, USM Rollout Team

On Wednesday 15 July we ran a session looking at Re(Evaluating) Remit in the New Normal. During this session we brought colleagues from across the University together to –

• reflect on what has happened and highlight what worked well.
• avoid repeating what didn’t work by acknowledging it.
• actively decide to continue that ‘what works’.

We used a ‘Lightening Decision Jam’ in Mural to facilitate the session, working through some of the positives and negatives of working remotely to take what has been working well and using this to reframe the challenges with a view to making these better while we continue to work remotely or in pods as we return to campus.

One of the other Summer School sessions focused on Mural and the ‘Lightening Decision Jam’ as a tool to support remote working and distributed teams– you can read about them here. 

At the end of the session we had some concrete actions that everyone involved in the session could do to mitigate for some of the challenges they faced. These included;

• Encourage team to block breaks/lunch in calendar
• Agree on a platform for certain types of communications
• Ask people how they would like to be contacted, and include your contact preferences in your email signature

One of the more large-scale actions was taken up as a project by the USM Team and UCD Agile, which focuses on the ‘remote office’:

• Share best practice on how your team best communicates, using a variety of platforms.

You can read a bit more about the fact-finding survey we circulated here, in our piece on remote working.

It can be tempting at times like this to stick the head down and plough forward with the work we have to do, particularly when we’ve got so much of it to do! It was great to be able to take a step back, look at what people were working on, the new ways they were working, and pull together some of the strands to make the “new normal” feel a little less “new” and a little more “normal”.