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Implementing a Service Approach at the University of East London


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Understanding, navigating and accessing University services is fundamentally linked to student success, it is core to the experience.  Moving to a service culture with a clearly defined service catalogue enables everyone to understand the ‘what, how, who and when’ of the service offer simply and easily. 


'The Strive Higher team got to the heart of the challenge quickly and developed a service catalogue approach collaboratively, adapting to our needs. They brought together a cross-University community empowering them to adopt this new way of working with great outcomes.’ 

-Niamh Godley, Director of Change and Improvement 


The brief: 

 

The University of East London (UEL) engaged Strive Higher to support the design and implementation of a service catalogue. UEL are partway through achieving the ambitions set out in their Vision 2028. A step change around service approach was needed to stabilise, streamline and accelerate further progress.    

 

The service catalogue would determine service scope and offer across core services. It sets service levels, service owners, the deployment model and demonstrates the implications change has for a future resource model. It provides the service measures needed to manage and continuously improve service delivery to students, partners and staff.  

 

We recommended developing the service catalogue collaboratively, empowering those delivering services to be fully involved so the service approach is fully embedded with the broadest skills base to support its implementation. 

 

Our approach: 

 

We captured the existing service landscape by engaging senior leaders, service owners, subject matter experts and service users. This led us to develop a methodology for delivering an informed service catalogue, supported by an underpinning service culture and a continuous improvement approach. 

 

We led a series of workshops co-created with experts across UEL covering key themes like service culture principles, change, community, measures & sustainability. These workshops built a community of practice to share approaches, experiences and break down silos. Beyond the workshops, we worked with UEL to build a toolkit and supported the teams to develop a high-level service map which we used to map processes and identify future improvements. 

 

Going forward, the community of practice will now continue their journey using the framework, tools and templates to support them. This toolkit also provides an effective way of broadening adoption to more functions and further embedding an overarching service culture and continuous improvements approach through empowerment and positive change.  

 

Outcomes: 

 

  • A Service Culture community of practice with concrete plans to respond to feedback and the commitment to make changes that positively impact students, staff and partners at UEL 

  • A University-wide Service Approach toolkit and associated training material for wider adoption 

  • Revised model of support for an improved student, staff and partner experience 

  • Informed how Strive Higher’s ‘Service Approach: Culture, Catalogue & Community’ can be applied to support any university 


Read more about our Education & Student Experience, and Transformation & Change service offerings.


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