This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc.
That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us to consider the priority of those compared to a shiny new AI tool. Yes, the tool might be very cool and we might agree it’s a tool we want but you might be surprised if you ask us to make an ordered list in priority order, and force us to think about which we want most.
One mistake I’ve seen made year after year (with some suppliers, not all) is getting us into a workshop and saying ‘blue sky thinking, whaddya want?’. We go mad and write down every idea we’ve ever had. The workshop finishes and we go away and get on with our life. The supplier takes an unprioritised list and then makes a bit of a stab at prioritising themselves. We then moan about how they never fix the bugs or build the features we want.
A Head of School in a department I worked in before always used a beans metaphor. I thought this was a brilliant way to work with people – it simplifies the prioritisation task a lot. You only have 10 beans. How many beans would you allocate to that <insert feature/change/budget spend….>? Now you have 7 beans left, what about this one….? The beauty of this is it shows the reality of the world. There are limits to the beans, no one has unlimited beans, and everything needs to be prioritised.
So suppliers….before you go away and build something… make sure you count your beans!
