This week we had our October Quarterly Away Day. This is a time when the whole team gets together in person to celebrate the past quarter and discuss plans for the upcoming quarter, sharing our goals and ensuring everybody is on board with our KPI’s and targets. This enables everyone to understand and feel ownership of our shorter-term roadmap to help us achieve our 2030 Digital Strategy, empowering the team to ask questions and have meaningful discussions around all of our priorities, ensuring everyone is aligned. We also allocated some time for fun team building activities of course! Read this blog post to find out more about our day.
A visit from Mike Shore-Nye
Following our recent move into Professional Services (PS), we began the day with a visit from UoE Registrar, Mike Shore-Nye. Mike spoke about the University’s progress and achievements from 2022-23 – of which there were many, it’s been an amazing year! He also shared insight on the PS priorities and strategic areas of focus, of which Digital will be a key enabler. We had insightful discussions around opportunities and priorities for Digital across 2023-24, which include scaling our new University of Exeter app, continuing to grow our Digital Upskill Experiences, hosting the THE Digital Universities UK 2024 next April, and many more.
Celebrating a successful quarter
We of course had to spend some time reflecting on a great Q1 2022/23. From enabling the team to have regular focused 1:1’s with their line managers, to launching our Data Community and the new University of Exeter web-based app, now with over 6,000 users – it’s been a hugely successful quarter. We reflected and moved to discuss what we want to achieve over the year ahead.
Product roadmaps
Next, we moved on to our product presentations. Each Product Owner presented the roadmap goals for their product, outlining how we will measure success and inviting a discussion around each product with the team. This is a great way for us all to align our priorities and stay up to date with each product and service we offer. Our colleagues can stay up to date with this at our fortnightly Digital Demo’s – find out how to join them here.
Building connections
Finally, we finished the day with some valuable team building activities. Facilitated by Dan Collins from Fresh Tracks, we split into groups and built a trail of dominos, working together to make it work seamlessly. We then built a large course of dominos as a whole team. This section of the day taught us all about the importance of effective communication and that making mistakes is okay. We learnt that mistakes can happen but that it’s easy for a team to come together to fix them. It was a fun task which brought the team together while learning an important message.
To learn more about our away day get in touch.
Our colleagues can stay up to date with Digital by attending our fortnightly Digital Demo sessions here, and can also sign up to receive our monthly Digital Digest newsletter here.