As part of her 12 weeks as an Advice Team intern Tiffany Sobowale was able to observe and join in with the work of the Digital leadership and culture programme team. 

The internship gave her an opportunity to better understand Jisc’s work, to provide support to members, and experience the place of digital leadership and culture in the UK’s further and higher education sector through the Digital leaders programme and the Digital strategy review service. 

In this guest blog points she shares her reflections and takeaways on the advice that the programme team regularly delivers through its advice, guidance, and training. 

This summer I had the pleasure of joining Jisc’s Advice team as part of my summer internship. I have had the opportunity to work across their programmes and in particular the Digital Leadership and Culture programme. As my internship comes to an end, here are my reflections on five essentials for digital leaders to ensure their vision and strategy are successful. 

Create a vision before you draft a strategy 

Creating and implementing a strategy can be difficult and is often overlooked. However, it becomes even more difficult when there is no vision ahead of a strategy. A strategy is essentially a plan to realise a particular vision. Without a vision there is no way of ensuring that the different plans in an organisation are aligned to a common destination. 

Methods to embrace a visioning mindset: 

• Create mind maps that encompass your end goal 

• Think about what you want the outcomes of your changes to be and how this benefits your staff, students and other stakeholders   

• Engage in co-creation of your vision to consider numerous perspectives so that it is shared and owned by students, staff, and other stakeholders to encourage future buy in. 

 

Invest in what you need rather than what is new  

In the dynamic environment that we live in today, it is easy to get caught up in wanting to possess all the new digital applications and advancements. In doing so we may find ourselves investing time and/or money in new technologies, only to realise it isn’t something the organisation needs.  

Identifying what issues within your institution should be addressed and using this to decide which technologies solve the problem can be a  valuable exercise. However, it is important to distinguish between those problems where investment is necessary and those that can be addressed without investment in new technologies. Furthermore, investing based on progress is valuable. For instance, your institution can start of investing sensibly in a small number of technologies, as time goes along this investment can be increased when new technologies’ value becomes clear. 

Investing time into identifying what is needed through: 

• Student feedback 

• Teacher and department feedback  

• Mapping processes using process maps to identify delays and inefficiencies  

 

Prioritise what is important 

After articulating a shared vision that is informed by the needs of your staff and students prioritise it is essential to prioritise the actions according to what is most important and achievable. Prioritisation can ensure that the strategy is both realistic and flexible in its timescales.  

Possible factors for prioritisation: 

• Long – term vs short -term impact 

• Resources available (financial, human capital, raw material, time) 

• Turnaround rate 

• Level of end user buy-in and support 

• Level of practicality  

 

Engage with the needs and perspective of your staff and students.

Envisioning does not only mean what you want the destination to look like but also what your key stakeholders want it to look like and how they will be impacted by the change. Demonstrating empathy can help to place yourself in the perspective of others and acknowledge how might they want the problem to be solved. Utilising stakeholder mapping could be a very useful method to identifying who’s perspectives are required. Empathy maps are then a great way to understand their needs.  

 

Be ready to be flexible

While the vision should remain set  in one’s mind, the strategy should be flexible enough to realise the vision as circumstances change. When creating a strategy, it may be helpful to ask, ‘does my roadmap allow adjustments to be made in the future?’ Adjustments are important to consider as several unpredictable forces will occur in any time frame, especially during a long-term strategy. 

Possible ways to ensure a flexible strategy: 

• Embed continuous reflection points in the strategy 

• Constantly align your strategy with events in the environment through research and alertness 

• Incorporate back up plans within the innovation pipeline  

 Having Tiffany join us as part of the internship with Jisc was a great privilege and we hope that she will be able to continue to apply and build upon her insights into digital leadership, vision, and strategy in her continued study and future career. 

What do you think?  What are the essentials for vision and strategy that you bear in mind?