Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim: I am excited about this next presenter because she is the first technology leader to present an experience report from higher education. Over the years we have had many faculty members and researchers, but not someone who is actually responsible for the thousands of things that need to be done correctly to support students, faculty, researchers, fundraising, administration, and so many more things required to run a modern university.

Gene Kim: Sophie Harrison is a Director of Agile Product Delivery at University College London, which was founded in 1826 and has 51,000 students who are selected from an applicant pool that is larger than either Cambridge or Oxford. She is going to share a story of how she is helping advance some of the most important missions we have as a species. Here is Sophie.

Sophie Harrison

Sophie Harrison: Thank you, Gene. I thought you said that Sophie Harrison was founded in 1856 for a minute then, and I was going to have to correct things. Welcome, and thank you everybody for having me here today. I am going to talk to you a little bit about University College London and why I am on a mission to introduce Agile and DevOps into the higher education sector.

Sophie Harrison: A little bit about me: my name is Sophie Harrison and I am the Director of Delivery. I work within the Information Services Group within UCL. I have been at UCL for two and a half years now. I have always worked in IT delivery and transformation spaces, but this is my first higher education role. Prior to UCL, I worked as a consultant for a while, and I have worked in the semiconductor industry and e-commerce as well.

Sophie Harrison: To tell you a little bit about UCL: how many people here have heard of UCL, by the way? Okay, great. This is good, loads of you. We are very well known in the UK. Perhaps the brand gets a little bit confused globally; sometimes people think we are talking about UCLA or somewhere else. We are a big and complex university. We are very research-intensive, second in the UK for research power, and we are very proud of that. We have created some pretty cool people: 30 Nobel laureates and counting, hopefully. There are 51,000 students at the moment, so we are a big, big university, and we have 16,000 members of staff supporting and running that whole machine.

Sophie Harrison: We are a pretty cool place, if I say so myself. Founded in 1826, we have been pretty disruptive since the start. We were the first university in England to welcome students from any religion or social background. We were also the first university in England to welcome women into university education. We have always been doing things that were progressive and brave and forward-thinking.

Sophie Harrison: Then I joined the Information Services Group. With the most respect to all my wonderful colleagues who have been working there for a long time, we were not a very disruptive, progressive, or brave organization. We were a very traditional IT department. I inherited the project delivery function and we had a long list of projects. Nobody could tell me if it was the right list of projects, but we had a long list of projects we were meant to be working on.

Sophie Harrison: I have a wonderful colleague, Tom, who is my counterpart and looks after operations. The story goes that the way it would generally work is there would be an annual round of funding. Some people would be lucky and we would work on their projects, and some people would be unlucky and they would probably just go off and buy the thing they wanted in the first place with a different budget. Then we would grapple with trying to ignore architects until we wanted to release something, and then just chuck it at Tom and his team, who had to look after it for the foreseeable. I am seeing nods; it is surely a familiar story.

Sophie Harrison: The opportunity came along. This slide gives a summary of what we are trying to say here, but in the last couple of years we have developed a strategy. By 2027, we wanted to have in place a much more improved university. The strategy is really to focus on improving what we are already very good at: building upon our research and education strengths. We also wanted to streamline our educational offering. There is a theme within our strategy to reduce the time and effort that our students and staff are having to take on administrative and transactional pieces of work. There is also some great stuff in the strategy about improving the culture, making sure it is a culture of openness and inclusion. Of course, with all strategies, there is the financial part: making sure we do it in a financially sustainable way.

Sophie Harrison: What we are faced with here is really a huge amount of change that we need to deliver in the next four years. The challenge for us in Information Services was to understand how we are going to go about doing that when it would take us a good two or three years to deliver any one single project.

Sophie Harrison: What is it that we wanted to do? We started an agile transformation. The real reason we started this is, of course, the pandemic hit, and that has been the force to change the ways of working for many organizations over the last few years. That pandemic showed us that we could change the way we were working pretty rapidly, and we had to. Within a few months we had to provide a digital education experience for our students. There was no other option. We had to continue working as a university, and we needed people to be able to continue being taught and continue teaching.

Sophie Harrison: We had proven to ourselves we could do things differently. This gave us the confidence to go forwards rather than rewinding back to the old way of working. We were going to move forwards in this new way. We agreed on four shifts that would underpin our transformation. I would encourage all of you to do something similar if you are embarking on a transformation, because they have been timeless and we keep coming back to them over and over again.

Sophie Harrison: Number one, product over project. I think I heard David talk about this yesterday morning. We did away with that list of projects. It was tricky and quite radical, but we said, no more projects. We are going to organize ourselves into product teams. We have some platform teams as well. That is not just my department in delivery. We are taking all of Tom's teams in operations. We are bringing the architects into the fold. We are bringing security into the fold. If you work in Information Services, you are now going to be working in a product or a platform team. We have organized into 40 standing teams, and they are funded long-term. We have got rid of that annual funding and budgeting cycle, and they are organized into eight portfolios.

Sophie Harrison: Experience over technology was something that many of our teams found an interesting idea: that we were suddenly not going to talk about technology at the forefront of what we are doing. Just as we have heard in many of the talks over the last couple of days, it is about really understanding the outcome we are trying to achieve and focusing on experience as something different from the technology. They do not need to be coupled together. I am going to give you an example of how that works in a moment.

Sophie Harrison: Empowering over control was the cultural piece within our IT department: making sure we went away from this command-and-control mindset, but being really clear with our teams what it was we were trying to achieve, then letting them work out how to do it, and removing all the blockers, the things in the way, and the things they needed permission to do, because they are now in a team with people who were originally those blockers or those things they needed to navigate.

Sophie Harrison: Co-create over order-take was about changing how we are perceived within the university and how we work with others. We were quite a subservient organization. To tell you a little bit about UCL, you can imagine we have all our faculties, led by deans, with all the different academic departments. You also have the offices of the president and provost, with departments such as advancement, marketing, and strategy. Then you have the professional services group. As we heard earlier today from Jason, being in that corporate IT place is quite difficult, and you are often just receiving orders: please integrate this, please do that, make this happen. But being able to come to the table and establish ourselves as co-architects of the future: the future is digital, and you need digital leaders to help contribute to that. We really want to position ourselves as co-creators rather than order-takers.

Sophie Harrison: The team used to say to me when I joined, what is this transformation going to look like when we are done? I was at pains to explain that we are never going to be done. It does not finish. It is a product in itself that we have: we have a transformation. Nonetheless, I did need to hang my hat somewhere, so I came up with these five yellow boxes. This slide is two and a half years old, but these yellow boxes have really persisted as well. I am really pleased to say that we are doing all of these things now.

Sophie Harrison: Our teams can deliver value to UCL iteratively and frequently. We are no longer doing this big-bang, wait-till-everything-is-perfect before it gets released. That is something the university has to learn to trust in us, because previously we would deliver something, run off, and never come back for another couple of years until you got more funding. The idea that we are going to release it and it does not look perfect, but we promise we are still there with you on this journey to make it better, is a journey we are still on.

Sophie Harrison: Those portfolios I mentioned: we have all our teams grouped into eight different areas. Really importantly, there is a portfolio owner and sponsor for each portfolio aligned to the functional area of the university. For example, Student Experience is a portfolio. Our registrar of UCL is the portfolio owner of Student Experience. Another one, People, Money and Insight: our chief people officer is the portfolio owner of that portfolio. So we can be really clear that it is not somebody like me trying to decide what we are actually working on. We are empowering those portfolios with somebody from the university sat at the table with us to make sure we are prioritizing and working on the most important thing we can.

Sophie Harrison: Delivery data is transparent and mastered in one place. You may be surprised to know how much people really objected to this at the start: I do not tell you what I am working on; I have got it on my own Excel. None of that anymore. I was careful to be technology-agnostic about this at this point, but as it happens we have now got everything within Jira and that is working pretty well for us. We have everything at the team level and rolled up into the portfolio. I can take a look across all eight portfolios. As the transformation continues and with our plans going forwards, more and more of our development data and service data becomes transparent as well.

Sophie Harrison: There are two cultural ones at the end here. People can understand and perform their role in the organization, and there is a culture of learning and continuous improvement. This is critical because this move of moving everybody into product teams did affect roles in a positive way. We did not do any redundancies or anything like that, but we said to people, look, you are going to have to make a decision here. These layers we have of management and team management and team leadership, those skills are very valuable and we still need them, but we are actually expecting you to align into one of the roles in a team. Maybe your skillset is more on the technical side, and we can find a platform ownership role or technical lead role for you. Maybe you are more an organizer, a delivery person, in which case come and join our delivery team.

Sophie Harrison: We made sure we were clear from the get-go that the roles are changing a little bit. We are expecting more of a T-shaped contribution, and we need to make sure these teams keep moving and delivering continuous learning and continuous improvement. We continue to invest in that. It is not something that we can scrimp on. To put it into context, we have many colleagues in the team who have been working in the university for an incredibly long time, so I am asking them to jump in the swimming pool with me and go swimming in this Agile and DevOps world, and they have never swum before. We really have to keep the education piece and the continuous improvement piece continually invested in.

Sophie Harrison: I wanted to tell you a couple of stories about how this has played out in reality. The first example is about implementing our new recruitment service. A bit of history: we had previously been out as a project and procured a new solution for a recruitment system. Then the project was beginning in a waterfall manner. This was back in 2018 or 2019. It was difficult, and we could not have the right people in the room at the right time. Then the pandemic came along and we just had to shelve that one for a moment, and that was absolutely fine.

Sophie Harrison: Post-pandemic, we looked at this and said, let us look at it in the new way. What is it that we are trying to achieve? At this point, a new head of recruitment had joined the organization, and she was the perfect product owner you could wish for: somebody really open-minded, saying, I appreciate there are complexities here, there is a lot going on, but I am open to working with you in a different way.

Sophie Harrison: Thinking about experience first, what were we trying to achieve? We said, we want to reduce the time it takes to hire. At the moment it takes 127 days from wanting to open a role to being able to recruit somebody, and it is too long. We want to increase the number of people applying. People were completely put off applying for jobs at UCL because there was such an unfriendly interface that they had to interact with. You could not just upload your CV or click through from LinkedIn. You had to copy and paste bits of your CV into many different areas on the webpage. It was really unpleasant.

Sophie Harrison: We said we are going to implement it incrementally. We are just going to get the smallest bit out we can, then get feedback from it. The response was brilliant. I am glad to include a quote from Angela here, who said that by agreeing a minimum viable product and using Agile rather than the traditional perfect-or-nothing approach, we were able to realize the benefits of the new system much quicker. It was a more pragmatic approach and created less conflict.

Sophie Harrison: I am really pleased to say that our time to hire was 127 days, and we have got that down at the moment to 48 days, which is a great improvement. We still have more to do because we are still working with Angela to continually, incrementally improve the service.

Sophie Harrison: A second story I wanted to share was about experience as well. We have a massive, monolithic, on-premise ERP system. I am sure some of you have similar situations. Ideally we would just rip that out and put a new one in, but we all know that is not something you should undertake lightly. We are probably not in the best place from a process and policy perspective to do that. We will go to the cloud at some point, but we are where we are now.

Sophie Harrison: The image on the left is a snapshot of a little bit of what that experience looks like if you are going to try to book a day's leave. It takes you at least half a day to book the day's leave, so you need to do a few at once. Before you get to this page, you need to go on the VPN, click self-service, absence, absence management, and when you click on that it gives you a page where you need to put in information that the system definitely already knows about you. Then you can book a day off.

Sophie Harrison: What are we going to do? We are not going to rip out the whole system yet; it will come in time. We decided to decouple the idea of the system of record from a system of experience and quickly start building this really nice, responsive, UX-first approach. We came up with something we called Inside UCL. You can access it on your website, you can access it on your phone, and you do not need to go on the VPN. It started off with my details and my time off. You can click on time off, it shows you how much time you have available, and in two clicks your time is booked.

Sophie Harrison: We realized this is now a really nice digital channel that can support conversations that are experience-led rather than technology-led. On the left you will see declarations of interest. This was a data point where, as a university, we were concerned whether we really had enough information about whether people had to declare any interests working at the university. Sometimes due to relationships with certain research environments or perhaps because of certain political issues going on, we want to know where conflicts may arise.

Sophie Harrison: Again, we asked, what is the problem we are trying to solve here? We want to be quicker at capturing that information. What we are hearing is people saying it takes too long in the old system, it is really unintuitive, and I do not know how to do it. So it becomes a perfect contender to add to Inside UCL. By default it checks whether you have any declarations. You can say no, press one click, and you are done. It is so much easier.

Sophie Harrison: On the right is a similar situation: the training dashboard. Mandatory training in the past, I can almost guarantee the suggested solution to this would be, can we have a new training platform? But actually, once you get into our training platform, it is not too bad. The problem is people cannot remember if they have done the training, and managers do not know if their teams have done the training. We have a few different training platforms, and that is perhaps okay for different scenarios. So again, bring it all together.

Sophie Harrison: We are really quick at developing this now. We have built automated tests, so you can run the whole pack in a couple of hours and quickly add new things on here. We can test deploying things to one user group and seeing how they respond, and testing it with another.

Sophie Harrison: A funny story: when we went to go live with the first iteration of Inside UCL, we were talking to the service desk. This was earlier in our transformation journey, so they were not quite as comfortable with the whole idea of releasing a beta. They said, send us your user documentation that you are planning to write. We said, we are not planning to write any user documentation. We will write some stuff for you, but our users are just going to know how to use this thing, otherwise we failed. There was a moment where they thought, wow, they really are trying something different now.

Sophie Harrison: To finish, I am trying to start a bit of a movement in higher education. Over the last couple of years I have had the opportunity to speak at higher education industry conferences and meet lots of people in similar roles to mine. What I have discovered is that Agile and DevOps is not happening in higher education. Lots of IT departments are feeling exactly the same way we felt a couple of years ago, but there is appetite to start exploring.

Sophie Harrison: Just a couple of weeks ago I was working with PA Consulting, and we hosted an event where we had 75 IT leaders from different universities in the UK all come together to take part in an immersive Agile experience, so they could see what it would be like to do a Big Room Planning of their own. There is so much appetite there. My ask for you is: I cannot do it all by myself. I really want to expand my network of people who would not mind getting phoned up or getting an email saying, would you mind talking to so-and-so who has some questions about Agile and DevOps? There is so much interest and appetite, and I am going to need some help spreading the word. Thank you very much and goodbye.