In project management terms, the Information Futures Commission achieved sign-off last month.
The Commission delivered three key documents to the University community:
- Final Report of the Steering Committee, describing the consultation process, summarising what we learned, and analysing the major areas of contention
- Melbourne’s Scholarly Information Future: a ten-year strategy (“Zis iss ze big vun,” as Otto von Chriek might say)
- Implementation plan, including a budget proposal and a governance proposal
The Final Report was noted by the Academic Board and University Council. This now becomes part of the University’s official records, providing information about why particular decisions have been made.
The Scholarly Information Future strategy was endorsed by both Academic Board and Council. This makes the strategy an official part of the University’s planning and reporting framework. The strategy describes what we want to do, and by when.
The implementation plan was presented at the annual Planning and Budget Conference where money is allocated for the forthcoming calendar year. (So yes, there is a six-month lag between approval of budget and the appearance of actual money on the (virtual) table. Previous experience has shown that much can happen in those six months — universities are very political organisations.) The implementation plan describes how we will make the strategy’s aspirations into realities; the governance model specifies who will be responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.
Decisions are made outside the committee room
Getting a new strategy, governance model and funding proposal approved is not simply a matter of writing the documents and sending them to the relevant committee secretaries. The real decisions of committees and boards are made outside the boardroom.
With the Information Futures Commission, we had the perfect project sponsor — a CEO who is adept at engagement with both ideas and people, who has a reputation for getting things done and who carries great personal credibility within the organisation.
We also had a project leader who combines expertise in her professional fields with a strong emphasis on finding the best possible outcome for everybody involved in a given situation.
Within the project team, we rehearsed many different ways of telling our story. These rehearsals influenced how we wrote the final documents, how we talked at meetings and forums, the selection of examples and anecdotes for presentations. We drew pictures on our whiteboard, we stuck flurries of Post-Its to the walls, and we talked across the partitions at least every half-hour (or whenever inspiration happened to strike). This verbal and visual creativity also provided a fair bit of laughter for the project team, and free entertainment for members of other project teams who worked in nearby cubicle pods.
Eventually some concepts and language became canonical — we reached a rough consensus about how we wanted to express our ideas to others — and this informed our discussions with the Steering Committee.
Throughout the life of the Commission, our sponsor and our leader each spent quite a bit of time and energy on meeting with individuals and groups, explaining the strategy and answering questions about what it means for the University. This intensified in the last two months, as the deadline for decisions drew nearer.
We also called on members of the Steering Committee, and other senior stakeholders, to add their voices to the general conversation — to talk with their colleagues and peers about adopting the strategy, to find money for its implementation.
