It’s beautiful isn’t it? To really try to see people we are working with, to realize that at the end of the day we all go home to something and it will affect us in our work life whether we want it to or not. Life isn’t black and white, it’s complex and messy, and the sooner we realize that each person has a struggle, a disability, and pain we can hopefully treat each other with the respect we would want in return.
“Collaboration leads to innovation” is a phrase I learned here at Illinois Tech during my freshman year. So why is there such a lack of collaboration between departments within the University, and what can we do to improve it? The un-workshop session helped break communication barriers and encourage collective collaboration.
Scott Downs writes about six key lessons from the “Agile way of working,” which have brought big changes to the way he looks at leadership and organizational life. He sees these lessons as a way to “weave an Agile ethos with other strands of next-generation leadership thinking and practice.”
The User Services Department of the Paul V. Galvin Library at Illinois Institute of Technology has recently embarked on a Service Design project with the help of SASDI’s Continuous Improvement unit in a half-day visioning session. This process allowed us to focus on the services and experiences that are most important to us and our students, rather than trying to reengineer processes without looking at the bigger picture. As a result, the group was able to identify the key service aspects that warrant the group’s focus.
The CI unit hosted its third seminar on Tuesday, December 5, 2017, at the Illinois Tech Downtown Campus, using space at the Institute of Design. We ran this seminar in October and November 2017, with the same attendee goals for each session, but in a different physical area, which allowed participants to reflect on the information away from the usual associations tied to their normal office space.
Due to expanded interest in offering an introduction to continuous improvement, the CI unit offered a second seminar on Friday, November 10, 2017, to the Illinois Tech community. With the same objectives, we applied feedback from the first seminar to make further improvements on content and delivery.
The new Continuous Improvement (CI) unit within the Office of Student Access, Success, and Diversity Initiatives (SASDI) hosted a seminar on continuous improvement and change management. In addition to colleagues from SASDI, we welcomed colleagues from five other departments across campus.