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Staff from across IT Services share their top tips to help increase productivity and look after your wellbeing. Have you got a top tip that could make colleagues’ lives a bit easier? We’d love to hear it! Drop Lucy Turner a line in Teams – or email its-communications@contacts.bham.ac.uk. Add public holidays to your calendar – … Continue reading “Top tips: IT staff recommendations”

28 June is Pride Day – marking the date of the Stonewall Riots, which occurred on 28 June 1969 and sparked a series of protests and parades across the world, campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights. The whole month of June is a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community – but also a chance to shine a light … Continue reading “Pride Month 2021: Queer reading recommendations”

The advantages of having a mentor supporting you are well documented. However, there are lots of positive aspects to being a mentor as well. In this article, Tara Lamplough, Head of Business Partnering, shares her insights into the benefits of being a mentor.  What is a mentor?  A mentor shares information about their career path, as well as providing guidance, motivation, emotional support and role modelling to their mentee(s). A mentor may help … Continue reading “Secretly selfish reasons to become a mentor”

Kitt Holohan, Graduate Management Trainee, shares a summary of her 4-month placement with IT Services, in which she showed endless enthusiasm and appetite to help move automation forward at the University. Best of luck in your new placement Kitt, we’ll miss you! As a first year Graduate Management Trainee on the University’s 2-year rotational Graduate … Continue reading “Finding and prioritising opportunities for automation”

Written by Kitt Holohan, Graduate Management Trainee, Business Partnering Each year, the Business Partnering team attends Digifest –  an EdTech conference run by JISC. Digifest 2021 adapted to social distancing restrictions, going online with an interactive virtual environment to host talks and panel discussions on learning, teaching and libraries from leaders in the industry. Each … Continue reading “Digifest 2021: Reflections on the last 12 months”

Green Impact registration goes live on Tuesday 19 January. Green Impact brings together students and staff to green campuses, curriculum and communities. IT Services has historically been very successful in Green Impact, winning Bronze Award in 2010, Silver in 2011, Gold in 2013, and Top Gold in 2012 and 2014. Then, key members of staff … Continue reading “Green Impact: Making IT sustainable”

In early December 2020, the Business Partnering, CX and Communications team held our annual “End of Year Review” meeting, writes Tara Lamplough, Head of Business Partnering. We find that this time of year is a good point to reflect on what has been achieved and to plan where we might want to improve our activities … Continue reading “Business Partnering End of Year Review 2020”

During November, the Equality and Diversity Group is exploring how the mental health of IT Services staff has been affected by the challenges posed by Covid-19. Since March 2020, the way we experience the world has changed drastically. None of us could have imagined, this time last year, that we’d be living through a deadly … Continue reading “Covid-19 and mental health”

[3 minutes reading time] The Problem Management team is continuing to make the Problem Management process in ServiceNow work better for you. We’ve already made a few changes; we’re now changing the problem stages (or states, as they’re known in ServiceNow) to reflect what is actually happening on the Problem record. The old states were … Continue reading “Improving the Problem process in ServiceNow”