Educase '09: Engaging the community

I went to a workshop about engaging your community when doing projects. Much of the advice that came from it is, on reflection, fairly common-sense based – communicate effectively, find users who are keen to be involved, make sure that senior people who could block your project are engaged, work on framing the problem rather than jumping to a particular solution, and so on. And the session wasn’t about how to actually succeed with your project deliverables, nor was it intended to be.

But I enjoyed the session nonetheless, partly because it was a workshop with exercises, rather than a presentation, and partly because it was led by enthusiastic, engaged presenters. And it served as a useful reminder that it’s eminently possible to have a project which succeeds brilliantly in terms of delivering what it was supposed to, on time and on budget, but which on some other level is a failure because what it delivers doesn’t do what people want, doesn’t make them happy. If you work in IT, it’s easy to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of getting things working and keeping things working – and of course that’s important – but it’s perfectly possible to deliver a service where everything’s working yet nobody’s happy. This session was a great reminder of how cultivating and maintaining good, productive, collaborative relationships with your users / colleagues / customers (delete according to taste and the prevailing methodology at your institution) is so very important if you want to deliver real services, rather than just be in the hardware and software business.

John Dale : 04 Nov 2009 20:51 |  Tags: Educase09 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem