All entries for Wednesday 09 May 2018

Provost's update No. 11 (May 2018)

PDR

The PDR window for this year will run from May 8^th- 20 July, and forms, guidance and education resources will be available from the main PDR website from the 8^th May. I know this is a busy time of the year, with the additional pressure of reorganising teaching this term, however I would still like to encourage as many colleagues as possible to take part, to ensure we are offering our teams support as required and acknowledging their hard work and contributions.

In terms of the process and academic form for 2017/18 there are only two changes to note. Firstly the section looking at goals for 2018/19 now reflects the criteria agreed as part of the academic promotions pathways work, and secondly there are additional prompts in the form to encourage a discussion around dignity, inclusion and respect.

As you may be aware it is hoped (subject to go live date) that some Professional Services colleagues will have an opportunity to trial the online PDR form provided by the Success Factors, (the new self-service online tool for many people-related processes). For this year this the online form will not be available to Professional Services colleagues based in academic departments, they should continue to use paper based forms alongside all other academic colleagues.

If you have any specific questions about the process, particularly those who are new to Warwick, your HR link advisor will be able to help.

Planning Round and Financial Plan

The planning round meetings are now essentially completed and we’re working on the overall ARC budget. We still have some way to go to get the ARC budget into a position in which we can meet our target surplus and thus ensure that the capital plan is funded, overheads covered and we have resource for strategic investment.

Strategic Fund

We expect to be able to confirm the size of the Strategic Fund later this month. And we will be looking to make some commitments from this fund fairly quickly. Some of these commitments will have emerged directly from department (so issues that have been discussed during the planning round); others will be more top down driven and will relate to institutional strategic priorities (so, for example, the new Impact Leave proposal will be a strategic fund investment). We will also look to use resource from within the strategic fund to support, where necessary, outcomes from the Strategy Renewal Process.

Capital Plan

Financial Planning Sub-Committee (FPSC) met last week to look at a first draft of the overall financial plan as well as to look at the current capital plan (including new requests for investment). This is still work-in-progress as we try to explore how we might accommodate new projects in what is already a very tight capital plan.

CSAG has also been doing some thinking about longer term capital development needs which will help to link some of the masterplanning work to the size and shape work to ensure we have a coherent approach to space needs for the longer term.

University Size and Shape - some further thoughts

The thinking around University “size and shape” will be presented for discussion with Council at its meeting in mid-May. In many cases, size and shape options for individual departments were discussed as part of the planning round. If they weren’t discussed during your meeting, we will be in touch to explore further the ways in which you think your department might develop over the period to 2030.

Adam Waddingham : 09 May 2018 10:00 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem