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Thoughts from our latest Community of Practice: Research Support (Technicians)
30 July 2019
We now have 15 established CoPs at 皇家华人ith three more in development. We spoke with CoP members from the recently established Research IT and Engineering Technicians CoPs.
Since our last update we have established Communities of Practice (CoPs) for Research IT and Engineering Technicians within Research Support (Technicians), Facilities Management in Estates, Programme Administration (Teaching) in SRS and Financial Management and Procurement and Purchasing in Finance.
Colleagues in Research IT and Engineering Technicians work in a diverse variety of vital roles across the university, from developing and maintaining research software to manufacturing and producing聽bespoke components.
UCL is a signatory of the National Technician Commitment and setting up Communities of Practice for UCL technical staff, is one of the initiatives聽included in our action plan as a way of supporting聽technicians' career development and ensuring聽the sustainability of their skills and expertise.
Thoughts from some of the community members
We spoke to some of those involved in the new CoPs about why they joined and what they hope to achieve as part of the communities.聽
On joining the community鈥�
Prof Ivan Parkin, Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences and Senior Sponsor for Research IT:聽
鈥淩esearch IT cuts across most of UCL, often in unseen ways, and there is a lot of experience across the university. This CoP will help staff share best practice and bring together colleagues that sometimes feel isolated by the nature of their work. We have already generated new ideas for ways of working that can help improve services for all."
John Bowels, Head of Laboratories for the Department of Earth Sciences and CoP Lead for Engineering Technicians:聽
鈥淚 decided to join the Engineering Technicians鈥� CoP as I thought it would be a good opportunity to bring together people who work in a similar area in order to learn and share ideas with each other. Also being part of the CoP gives technical staff a voice at Senior Management level at a time of change in the University and will help raise their profile.鈥�
On the CoP鈥檚 plans鈥�
Andrew Gormanly, Manager of Information Systems at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and CoP Lead for Research IT:聽
鈥淲e are currently planning for three projects for our first year: 鈥楥ommon user training鈥�, to provide excellent and consistent training in software development and high performance computing; 鈥楽afeguarding research infrastructure and data鈥�, a framework to protect research from the failure of critical but old, hard to support, or unsupported IT systems; and 鈥楿nified authentication across UCL鈥�, to allow users the option to authenticate with their UCL credentials on non-ISD research IT systems without needing to remember additional usernames and passwords.鈥�
Dr Brian O鈥橲ullivan, Manager of Microscale Bioprocessing for the Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering and CoP Lead for Engineering Technicians said:聽
鈥淲e are still in the early stages of the CoP so our initial projects are based on community-building and sharing best practice. We have a wonderfully diverse and multi-faceted skills base, but there is a danger that we can become isolated and siloed. Our 鈥楾alk and Tours鈥� project literally brings people together, to see how we work in our various roles, and to share best practice. We also have two 鈥楰nowledge Database鈥� projects which will tap into our wealth of expertise around areas of health and safety and risk assessment and make the information accessible to technicians across UCL.鈥�
Next steps
UCL currently has over 1,000 CoP members and over 40 CoP-led projects across the institution. There are 15聽CoPs across eight professional service areas and our goal is to set up CoPs across all major service areas at 皇家华人.
We are currently developing a CoP for Pre-Award Management in the Research Support (Pre-award) family to be set up in September and are preparing for both Recruitment and Talent and Learning and Development in HR.