Benefits Realisation

The benefits realisation activities have now been running for over 12 months and projects are starting to report on what they have achieved. So far two projects have submitted final reports and several more are due in the next few weeks. These reports are a good opportunity for others to discover the sort of activities that can lead to wider benefits for the sector.

Location Independent Working (LIW)

The Location Independent Working (LIW) project at Coventry University set out to improve the resources on the website and provide consultancy services to other institutions that wished to take up the ideas. A new LIW Knowledge Exchange web site (http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/liwsupport) was produced targeting external institutions providing advice, guidelines and other resources to help institutions wishing to implement an LIW-type scheme.

The project hosted several workshops to engage institutions and provided on-site consultancy to several institutions. The project activities have led to development of a consultancy service, eWorkingsolutions http://www.coventry.ac.uk/eworkingsolutions based at Coventry University.

The consultancy model proved to be difficult to implement in a short time scale and although institutions welcomed the opportunity to learn more about the LIW project they have not taken up the opportunity for further support at this stage. The institutional visits resulted in “more internal debate and ideas rather than elicit particular advice from the consultant”.

The project advised anyone setting up a consultancy-type service to realise benefits to be aware of the timescales involved in engaging institutions and changing culture. The LIW project consultancy was backed up by strong and detailed evidence, resulting from extensive evaluation during the project. Institutions want facts and figures, costs and benefits and proof that it will work in their institution.

Asset

The Asset project at the University of Reading (http://www.reading.ac.uk/asset/) explored the use of video to support and enhance the feedback experience for staff and students. A small scale benefits realisation project was funded at the University of Plymouth to explore the challenges of transferring the technology and approach to another institution.

The project managed to successfully set up a video delivery system at the University of Plymouth based on the systems used at Reading. It required some minor modifications to the software which have added functionality.

Staff at the University is only starting to be engaged with the system to produce material for the site, and some useful resources are already present at the university. An important link with the Students’ Union has been formed and further collaboration is planned.

The lessons from this implementation have been fed back into the Asset Project resources which are available from the web site. The full report from this benefits realisation project is available from the Asset project web site.