A working partnership between two adult education colleges: Morley College (top two photos), best known for music and the visual arts, and Hillcroft College (above), a residential college for women aged 19+. Above right: a Hillcroft student uses the new VLE.
meetings with potential VLE hosting suppliers, surveyed their customers online, and followed up some of them with additional conference calls to drill down into specific details that had arisen from the online survey. By the beginning of the autumn term, we had both chosen our final hosting services.
Communication
A key factor in running any project is of course communication. This is particularly true if you are running a joint project and have different base locations. Face- to-face meetings are critical to build rapport and trust. This is important at the beginning where you are still getting to know how each partner works and to understand the organisational contexts in which you operate. Obviously, emails and conference calls between meetings helped us to keep on track and check in with progress on tasks such as creating survey questions.
We also found the use of a shared cloud storage area a productive way to
December-January 2017/18
share documents so we could chart pro- gress and remain on the same page, while juggling our usual daily tasks.
Benefits
For us the main advantages of collab- oration were the opportunity to share out the workload and the research in finding potential hosting suppliers. This was crucial in order to run the project in a timely way whilst keeping day-to-day business going. It also meant it was easier for us to cut through organisational poli- tics as we both had the go ahead from our Senior Management Teams to work on the project in tandem. This made it easier for us to get other team members within our colleges on board with what we were trying to achieve.
Because we are from organisations with different cultures – Hillcroft is residential, for women 19+ and Morley is best known for music and the visual arts – and had different professional backgrounds in libraries (marketing, customer service) and technology (interactive design, supplier-side processes), we were able to bring fresh thinking and different perspectives to the table. As both of us work as sole VLE practitioners, this enabled us to bounce ideas off each other in a way that we were not able to do in our respective colleges.
Tips and reflective practice If you’re considering embarking on a col- laborative project then we’d recommend seeing it as much as possible as an equal partnership. This makes it easier to share workloads, identify individual strengths from the outset and develop synergies. As with all projects, good communication is essential and should include face-to- face meetings, particularly when getting started.
Organisations need to get behind the collaboration, ideally at college leadership level. The project manager role can be quite an isolated one at times and it helps to have support from a colleague who is working under similar pressures.
A valuable partnership
So if you have a project to undertake but a combination of factors including time, resources and expertise are limiting you, it is definitely worth considering a collaborative partnership. We found it invaluable for growing and honing skills and sharing best practice. You could even consider just working together on a single project stage as we did – completing the procurement process and then going on to migrate and develop our VLEs with different hosters. IP
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 53
VLE Collaboration
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