Work Smarter Together Newsletter

Welcome to the November 2020 Newsletter

Welcome to the November Newsletter

Welcome to our November slice of UCD life – tales from the ‘collaboration and creativity’ front. The autumnal mists are fading into winter evenings, thoughts of Christmas lights and flaming puddings come more to mind, the season’s cards to write, and cards to look forward to getting, fill to-do lists, the Leaving Cert (?!) running its November course, favourite songs …

Remote Working Stories: Jean McQuillan, Student Recruitment

Jean McQuillan greeted me from the attic of her home, with a glorious photo of the Belfield lake as her Zoom backdrop. With my own Zoom image of Monet hiding the remote working facility I call ‘my bedroom’, we swapped tales of the pitfalls of sharing WiFi with our families. Jean is the School Liaison …

The Distributed Office - the journey so far...

Like all good ideas, at the heart of the ‘Distributed Office’ concept is a story... the story of a journey… the people that shape it… a story we all have yet to finish writing. On March 13th we started working from home. While a lockdown had begun to seem likely, it was still a shock …

2020 Lean Practitioner Update

UCD’s first nine Lean Practitioners were presented with their Certificates of Achievement by the Registrar and Deputy president at last October’s WST event in The Fitzgerald Chamber in UCD’s Student Centre. Over a year later, we couldn’t have predicted how things would change. The 2020 October event took place through Zoom Webinar but that didn’t stop …

WST Event March 2021 - Save the Date!

The next big University-wide Work Smarter Together event will take place on 10 March 2021. At the heart of these sessions, since the first in 2014, has been the chance to connect up with colleagues from across the campus, attend interesting sessions, hear good thoughts, see good ideas... No matter what, I don’t think 400 …

Multicultural Mind Trips: Keeping a community connected during Remote Working

With the move to remote working the focus is often placed on the working itself. A lot of the community endeavours - coffee mornings and social gatherings - have fallen away since the move off-campus. The Multicultural Employee Network of UCD (MENU) is an exception to this. Over the last 8 …

Excel Learning Community

By Gregori Meakin, Arts & Humanities Desk The Excel Learning Community is an initiative to unlock the potential in the data, reports, and processes we use day-to-day, and the community that apply them – the emphasis is on development, application, deployment and dissemination. It is not about expertise in Excel itself, but in how we can best use it as …

Student Experience Mapping

To find out more about the Student Experience Mapping project, I chatted to Olga Murdoch recently. JA: I’m a complete newcomer to the concept of Student Experience Mapping, I’d love to find out more about it! Thank you for meeting me today - and its lovely to meet Maci, your beautiful black lab! Tell me, what is Experience Mapping? …

Project Management - Community of Practice

By Marian O'Connor, Senior Project Manager - Dean of Students Integrating project management and change management was the focus of the recent Project Management, Community of Practice Session hosted by Angelo McNeive, of Stepstone Consulting. There was great interest in this topic from project managers across the university as there is an increasing emphasis on managing the people side …

Streamlining Meetings – Just DO it

“Meetings are a great and necessary part of office life…” This is how Michael opened our first workshop around the theme of Streamlining Meetings. Gauging the reactions of colleagues via Zoom is not always easy (one of Zoom’s challenges), but those in attendance didn’t balk or cringe at this statement. There …

WST and Lean HE - a recap on October's events

The WST October 2020 Event October was a busy month in Agile, with one more of the many ‘firsts’ of 2020 happening on 22nd October when we ran our annual Work Smarter Together October event in the online world - in keeping with the predominant theme of 2020. We used Zoom Webinar - a relatively …

Read archived WST Newsletters

WST Newsletter archive page