Facilities Directorate Support Services Update, February 2021

Marketing, Sales and Communications

The team remain pivotal to providing marketing, and communications support and innovative solutions to all service areas within the FD. Planning for re-opening communications and related campaigns are progressing at pace to ensure that when facilities can reopen again business areas are ready to welcome back students and staff.

Throughout the pandemic, the team has quickly adapted to developing innovative marketing and communications to support FD services. Maintaining brand awareness and ongoing customer engagement with the University community is vital to ensuring we can maintain a loyal customer base who will return to our business areas once we reopen fully. The team have been continually fine-tuning social media content across all FD channels to reflect this sentiment.

The team are leading the communications for two significant capital investment projects, the Sir William Henry Bragg Building and the Faculty of Biological Sciences refurbishment, both reaching key milestones this month. Work is underway to bring these projects to life and showcase to the University community and future students how these facilities will enable world-leading research opportunities to take place as well as enabling new ways of working, teaching, and learning at the University.

Work is gathering pace to create the new name and brand identity for the GFAL café in the Esther Simpson building. The team will be leading workshops with key stakeholders from the Business School, School of Law and the LUU representatives to generate ideas for the naming of the café.

Following the successful Virtual Open Day last year, the team are once again working in collaboration with wider University colleagues to support the Virtual University Open days. Building on the good work last year, the team are fine-tuning digital assets and content to further enhance the experience for prospective students.

In April, the team will bid a fond farewell to Tilly Hall. Tilly has been at the University since 2011 and in this time has been a valued colleague, delivering excellent marketing and communications support for GFAL, SPA and more recently Sustainability. Sue Pimblett, Senior Marketing, Sales and Communications Manager said, “Tilly has been a brilliant member of the team for 10 years. Her knowledge, skills and her support of the wider team will be very much missed. I wish Tilly all the very best in her new career as a firefighter. The safety of North Yorkshire is in good hands!” Good Luck Tilly!

Print and Copy Bureau

As we entered the third national lockdown PCB (Print and Copy Bureau) re-opened the Goods Inwards Hub for the University. Once again, the team swiftly put the necessary processes in place to ensure delivered items are goods receipted and reach their recipient.

The team also extended its print services to Leeds Beckett University. PCB successfully won the contract last year to partner with Leeds Beckett and provide them with a full print service following the closure of their own internal service. Over the last few months, PCB implemented the necessary procedures and processes to ensure Leeds Beckett receive a high-quality service which meets their required standards. As part of this, they invested in a new online print solution last month and developed a new online service which enables Leeds Beckett staff to order print easily. Congratulations go to the team on achieving this contract and delivering a high standard of professional service.

Health and Safety

Staff are reminded that there is a Health and Safety team presence every day on campus. If there any safety issues you would like to raise or any unusual tasks that you need advice on, please contact the team. Any colleagues who are on campus regularly are eligible to take a lateral flow test twice a week. There is no need to prove evidence of testing to access University facilities.

First aid refreshers are being arranged for staff working on campus whose training is expiring. All first aiders should have received advice on how to keep themselves safe whilst treating people and have the enhanced PPE available to them.

Finance

£255,000 additional one-off funding has been successfully secured to support essential teaching capital equipment required to teach the higher numbers of students at intake in September 2020. The funding was successfully granted by the Office for Students this month. This money will allow the University to purchase equipment that will enable courses to be delivered more effectively through digital education. Areas which will benefit from this funding are Dentistry, the Faculty of Engineering, Medicine and Biological Sciences, Midwifery and Healthcare. Some of the equipment to be purchased includes a digital simulation of a human skull which dentists can be trained on along with high performance computing power to support teaching capacity or digital enablement to allow broadcast of the simulation.

The FD continues to manage its finances in a sound way in response to Covid as planning begins for the next 5-year business cycle following the launch of the University Strategy which will set a clear future direction. Alongside this work, the Finance Team’s focus remains on supporting colleagues to get through the pandemic challenges, this has included working with colleagues across all services providing the financial frameworks that supports the safe reopening of campus and helping colleagues in the commercial areas with business planning work during and post-Covid.

Project Management Office

Covid-19 has taught us some valuable lessons in the key role that processes play in keeping the Facilities Directorate functioning, no matter what is going on around us. To help teams clarify their processes, the Project Management Office (PMO) have been providing support to review their existing processes, with the aim of working towards implementing a quality management system. Capturing our processes and making them available to all employees has been identified as a critical requirement within the FD, and the Quality Management section of the PMO are going to be focusing particularly on writing and improving processes over the coming months. Starting with Estates and Facilities, work is underway with several teams to map activities, capture processes, and create or refresh the supporting documentation of those processes. By doing this, it will help to clarify processes that are currently unclear and help other stakeholders better understand your team’s ways of working.

The Business Support team are also working on an improvement portfolio across the FD and as part of this work have agreed a range of projects including introducing information management systems, making improvements to building locking and access arrangements for Estates and implementing an inspections system. It is anticipated that there will be an increase in the scale and number of projects delivered in the upcoming year and plans are currently being developed.

The team continue to support the FD by providing performance data reports to key service areas as well as progress reports for capital and revenue projects (mainly capital investments on campus and smaller maintenance and minor works schemes). Recently they supported the work to run asymptomatic test centres at the University providing management reports on the number of bookings and other statistics.