LAUSR

You do not need to be a Holistic Detective like Dirk Gently to appreciate the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. The effect should be familiar to any HE professional, whether they are trying to reschedule a single lecture or examination without the whole timetable unravelling, or struggling to limit the scope of a business change project to something achievable within the resource available. To take one example: consider the introduction of a self-service online portal through which students can apply to transfer between degree programmes. In simplest terms, the student fills out an online form, submits it, someone approves or rejects the transfer and the record is updated. But it is not just the student, the programme teams and the central records team who are involved in the process. The change of programme may also have implications for fees and eligibility for funding or for visas. Depending on the connection between the student’s original programme of study and the new one, results for modules they have already studied may be carried over to the new programme, or they may need to start afresh, so assessment records are affected. Once you start thinking through the implications, it is easy for the scope of the project to expand way beyond the original simple objective and become bogged down in additional functions. Yet some things are more connected than others. Processes such as programme transfer may have many logical connections and dependencies, but how joined-up are they in practice? Addressing problems, removing bottlenecks and just making the institution work more effectively needs input from a wide range of functions. Nevertheless, Higher Education staff can find themselves working in a number of silos in which a culture of ‘them and us’ can persist. There is still, despite the advent of the blended professional identified by Celia Whitchurch (Whitchurch 2008, 2009), a divide between academics and those in professional services roles. In any given institution there can also be divisions between academic units and the centre, between STEM subjects and arts or humanities, between staff and students, or between everyone else and a particular central service perceived by the rest of the institution to be dysfunctional. This can lead to antagonistic relationships where it is easier to blame the other side than to work constructively together to fix the underlying problem. So how can these silos be broken down to create a holistic approach?