IWMW 2017 Sketchnotes
Round up
The conference was excellent again this year - given the challenges of Brexit, and broader changes to the HE sector it was more upbeat than might have been expected. It seemed that there wasn’t much doom and gloom - instead people seemed to be confident in their abilities to meet the challenges. Mainly by building relationships and collaborating with people across the various organisations
For me, some major take aways -
The Service Design Manual at St Andrews was a practical tool to bring others across the organisation into to help spread good standards and practice. It’s likely that nit everyone needs something as extensive, but stating the teams’ opinions and decision so clearly in the open can only be good.
More broadly, thinking of threats as opportunities has been covered many times over the years, but the current climate really puts that to the test. Being optimistic at the start of what might be pretty difficult years ahead seems to me to be crucial.
I had so many good conversations with people in other Universities, seeing that we are ahead in some areas, behind in others. It’s been discussed before that the current state of HE might lead to some kind of contraction of the community around University Web teams, as people seek to gain some kind competitive advantage by discovering some killer technique or idea and not sharing it. This conference confirms to me what a wrong headed idea that would be.
Digital transformation was again on the agenda, but with people at very different stages and different approaches to make it work for them, neatly summarised by Stratos from Edinburgh -
Anyone can copy your strategy, but nobody can copy your culture
IWMW17 Tom Wright
Tom’s talk was a showcase of some of the cracking work that students have created on his watch. He was very generous and explained how much progress the students are making when given the opportunity and a bit of support.
IWMW17 Stratos Filalithis
Overview of the thorny issue of creating a collaborative culture. No shortcuts. To get something valuable requires a lot of relationship building.
IWMW17 Christopher Gutteridge
A very different flavour of talk this time. A really interesting and useful explanation of the life academic - getting an insight into why that academic you’ve asked for ‘content’ is taking a while to get back to you was really good.
IWMW17 Paul Boag
One of the handy things about such an experienced speaker is that the slidedeck is usually a great aide memoir, but Paul took that concept to the next level with his UX Culture cards.
IWMW17 Piero Tintori
Despite the slightly linkbait title, Piero managed to cram quite a lot of practical things to try in a short space of time, not going into tons of depth, but a really handy starting g point of things to try.
IWMW17 Micheal Frantzis
Interesting range over ways in which universities can understand Student behaviour better, by thinking a bit more about their experiences at university and what might be best for them as individuals, with some ideas how that might be achieved. Bloom’s sigma 2 problem sounds mysterious, but looks interesting.
IWMW17 Richard Prowse
Rich is always an engaging speaker, and in this session he had plenty to talk about. I’ve seen him describe the journey through content strategy at the University of Bath, and this talk was about the experience of building tools to support that. There was plenty of good reminders that the landscape content is being released into is changing fast, and so they’re trying to build a tool that accommodates that. The standout for me was incorporating user needs into the content creation process, to remind people that there needs to be a reason for the content to exist, and a measure of how successful it is against that goal. I’ve advocated a goal based reminder in CMSes for a while and it’s nice to see it happening - I think we’ll see it more and more.
IWMW17 Ruth Mason, Matthew Castle
This felt similar to the Cardiff talk in explaining a real world problem they faced - A scary security situation caused by lots of sites - and how they are dealing with it. I almost felt they covered too much. There were tantalising things about how the Lean Startup book was influential, how they were rebuilding a live product and the development setup to enable them to ship to product every 2 weeks.
IWMW17 Graham Bird, Jenni Taylor, David Hopkins
Some of the team at Cardiff University presented a roundup on how they’ve tackled the thorny issue of CMA compliance by some wrangling their course information into a Single Source of Truth. It felt like lots of people in the room were at various stages of this with their own peculiar problems of their own setups, but it was interesting to hear a story from the front line. Was tickled by the heartfelt “Get a Project Manager” that someone said.
IWMW17 Gareth Edwards
I was looking forward to Gareth’s talk, despite a pretty dry title, I enjoyed his talk from last year and was expecting good things. I wasn’t disappointed - his lovely slides had plenty of good nuggets to take away as a well as a nice introduction to a way of thinking about information management.
IWMW17 Melanie Read
Melanie’s talk was quite a departure from St Andrews’ since she explained how much restructure and change that the university has undergone, and that she has been tasked with sorting out a pretty big mess.
IWMW17 Carley Hollis
Probably my favourite talk of the whole conference.
IWMW17 Andrew Millar
Andrew talked a bit about the various organisational changes that they’ve undergone that universities are so fond of, and how that process has created opportunities to tackle some pretty fundamental problems.
IWMW17 Bonnie Ferguson
Interesting opening around the particular effect of Brexit on the very European facing University of Kent. The University has taken a conscious decision to continue emphasising it’s commitment to ‘remain European’.