A year ago, I absent-mindedly tweeted this, then we got organised.

So, after a great inaugural event in Sheffield last Summer, we went up to Edinburgh this time. I love unconferences, I love Edinburgh, I love the rail journey up the North East coast. So, I had high expectations.

As ever, it’s great to talk to other universities and be reminded that Cambridge is not weird. We’re rich and we’re eccentric but we have almost exactly the same problems as every other university digital team.

When I first got to HE, I felt like it reminded me of Whitehall (or at least, the bit I sat in) in 2012. Loads of tiny pockets of good work, either working under the institutional radar or without sufficient backing to actively change things. And while I think that’s not the worst analogy, it’s not enough. Universities are run by people who often don’t take the job purpose of digital seriously (one person mentioned that their extremely well regarded university had a named digital budget of £23k), people who often have come from academic research and teaching into complex major project management, assurance and risk without support or training to do so (and thus don’t really take the stuff that longtime staff say seriously) and that loads of people are “given a hat” and told they’re now agile or a content designer. It reminded me of something Phil Rumens wrote recently about digital in localgov:

Perhaps it's because the Service Standard describes how services can be built by the very few public sector organisations where large, fully multidisciplinary teams of user researchers, services designers, content designers, UX specialists, developers, and so on exist? In reality, for local authorities such as smaller districts which make up the majority of councils in terms of numbers, that kind of team will always be unobtainable. The second factor is that no matter what size the council, there isn't the right governance structure within that local authority in place, and my guess is it's just too much of a leap to go from the practice of buying something, switching it on, and hoping for the best, to designing services according to the standard.

What it actually made me do was think about my own job. I don’t necessarily think I’m doing something dramatically different day-to-day than an old “head of digital” would have. I’m working on governance, trying to put in teams, trying to link things up and embed the idea of service (both public and commercial interpretations). But I rarely get to be The Most Product Manager because that’s not the need. Or, if I did that, the other things wouldn’t get done.

I’ve come out of Edinburgh with a lot more ideas of things I was going to try that haven’t really worked and things that are fitting my New Year thing of trying not to burn out fixing everything by prioritising my work and focusing better.

Next time I’d really like to talk about things we haven’t tried, or to see if any universities get properly sued for PSED breaches and see what the motivation level is after that. And to perhaps dig into some of the big screw ups in tech (Horizon, NHS patient data, Edinburgh’s finance system) and think about how we can talk about those often coming from a place of insufficient audit knowledge at the top.

I’m forever grateful to the crew who put on the event, Charlotte, our DM from Sheffield approaches organisation in a way that should be rewarded with pay increments and a medal. The Edinburgh bunch were phenomenal and I can’t wait to see where we end up next time.