Meet The Tech Leader: UCL's Sophie Harrison & Andy Smith

‍Ed Halliday: I'm really pleased today to be joined for this 'Meet the Tech Leaders' interview series by Sophie Harrison, who is Director Product Delivery at UCL and Andy Smith who is CIO at UCL. Thanks a lot for joining us.

My first question is about UCL’s tech priorities. What are the universities current areas of focus and why?

Andy Smith: Thanks, and a nice to meet you. As CIO, I do try and connect the kind of mission objectives of the university to the technology we develop.

One of big areas of focus at the moment is on delivery an excellent digital experience. There are different expectations now from students and staff about how their digital experience and we need to respond to those expectations.

UCL is one of the top universities in the world and we do a lot of research, so another big priority is all the things we do to make researchers’ lives easier. We attract researchers to UCL by providing fantastic technology that supports them to do their work and, hopefully, get the answer to their research questions much more quickly.

Underpinning our key mission objectives, is a drive to make the university work better, such as how we make sure that work flows through the system, how we can work with the colleagues who look after the universities estates so that the experience of being in our campus is really good. And underpinning all of that is the core digital infrastructure and connectivity, the collaboration that helps you know the work to happen.

In this new post pandemic hybrid world, we must consider how will we help the university to embrace this new environment and be really productive. There's just some of the themes we’re thinking about.

Ed Halliday: Absolutely- thank you. Now thinking about digital transformation, this is something that is a constant for all of us at the moment.

How are you at UCL approaching digital transformation to stay ahead in the higher education space?

Andy Smith: Firstly, it's really important that digital is thought of as a partnership. It's not a set of IT people in a corner working on stuff. It’s about working with all the different parts of the university, making sure that kind of ecosystem that you need to deliver improvement actually works together. So, I guess my first message would be togetherness.

My second message would be to be agile. We're big believers in an agile approach and try not to deliver big programmes because the bigger it is, the more likely it is to fail. So, finding ways to deliver the work in amore incremental way is important.

We also need to balance our efforts against the different university needs and we don't try to do everything all at once.

Sophie Harrison: Yes, and to expand the togetherness theme: historically, new technology is seen as the thing that the IT department needs to deliver, and others in a different department will be waiting to receive it when it's complete.

Now, instead, and more than just working together, we are trying to merge those boundaries every day. You've got teams of people that are made up of some technology folks, and some people working in other departments to really co-create the right solutions. Many people have been on those projects where the thing gets delivered is not quite what we wanted in the 1st place. Now we’re trying to minimise the risk of building the wrong thing by bringing teams together into the same team almost, and trying to transcend those organisational boundaries,

Ed Halliday: That’s really interesting. At La Fosse Academy, we talk  about how digital transformation is actually a kind of cultural mindset and practise rather than a set of projects, as you say, delivered in the corner by a specific group.

Andy Smith: Yes, it’s really tricky balance is to find. We want big ideas – we need to be aspirational –, but also realism about actually delivering change in a university setting, how long that takes and being realistic about the capabilities of our teams. As well as dreaming big, we also make sure that we're very practical in what we try and deliver, and that we build up the skills of our team to achieve that.

Ed Halliday: That certainly feels like the nature of the university: that combination of extraordinary ideas, creativity and talent set within a complex environment. I imagine you have something like 6000 employees at UCL.

Andy Smith: More like 15,000 in fact. A university is a fantastic place with lots of ideas but as you say, can be a little difficult to achieve change in a similar way.

One of my mantras as a CIO is that you do need to love the organisation you work for how it currently is, as well as hoping you know you can help make it better. So we mustn't fight what the university is. My ultimate big boss, the provost of the university, describes himself as a kind of a chief exec on one hand, but also a kind of chief worker in a workers cooperative, because actually, you know the university is not there to make profit. It's there actually to support its educational staff and the educational outcomes we're trying to deliver in the world.

Ed Halliday: That’s very interesting to see a university in those terms. Now to think about the people who are going to be responsible for delivering some of this change:

What are the challenges and also opportunities you see around talent, and how do you go about addressing those at UCL?

Sophie Harrison: One of the things that Andy already alluded to is how broad and complex the technology landscape is. Something we grapple with is that you're looking for people with knowledge of different systems but also have that flexibility.

One of the brilliant things at UCL is we have lots of people that have been working with those technologies for a long time. We have lots of knowledge – sometimes it's written down, sometimes it's in people’s heads. One of our challenges is bringing people into that environment and upskilling them quickly to understand a lot of that legacy technology we use and balancing that with a road map of transformation to move away from legacy technology to the new. The new technologies we're introducing need a real mix of people to build and maintain.

I think globally the demand for technology talent is enormous and the supply. Organisations can barely keep up, so we obviously are always competing to secure those skilled and talented people that we need.

So how are we going about addressing this? We obviously want to look after the people we've already got and make the most of the knowledge that they've got. But we also want to supplement that with, by bringing in new members of the community.

And that's where we've been partnering well with La Fosse Academy to bring in cohorts of their tech trainees – I think they're known unofficially as ‘Code Force Alpha’ at the moment in UCL! –, to help bring in that fresh perspective.

They are individuals who are flexible to learn some of what we've already got but also bring in that kind of cutting-edge technology knowledge.

I think globally the demand for technology talent is enormous and the supply. Organisations can barely keep up, so we obviously are always competing to secure those skilled and talented people that we need.

We've been partnering well with La Fosse Academy to bring in cohorts of their tech trainees, to help bring in that fresh perspective.

They are individuals who are flexible to learn some of what we've already got but also bring in that kind of cutting-edge technology knowledge.

Andy Smith: Yes, I agree, it's great to have a CodeForce Alpha (I.e. La Fosse Academy associates) with us from just a couple of other perspectives.

I think that people's behaviours are really important as well. We are looking for people who have skills that can be applied to lots of different problems who can grow and develop a career with us, and people who like being part of a university, and a purpose-led organisation.

We're also really encouraging people who actually like solving problems. We say: don't wait for direction and feel empowered to actually solve them. Go find the users of their system, understand what annoys them, what would make their life easier.

It's great to have an injection of kind of new talent [from La Fosse Academy]. They come in and complementing the people who really know the university really well.

It's great to have an injection of kind of new talent [from La Fosse Academy]. They come in and complementing the people who really know the university really well.

Ed Halliday: Yes, I totally agree that it's as much about the technical, as the non tech skills and mindsets. These days, you can be independent: Google stuff you don't understand, be adaptable and learn for yourselves.

Do you see any growth in any particular types of roles?

Sophie Harrison: One thing that’s change in the last few years is we're really looking for those 'T-shaped' individuals. Those with a core capability – being a developer or business analyst might be your bread and butter – but increasingly we're hoping and expecting people to operate more widely: for example, a business analyst leaning into delivery management; delivery manager leaning into the data side. I think that's a different way of thinking and a different expectation.

We want people who really want to embrace that. I think that adaptability is a quality that we're looking for more and more.

We're really looking for those 'T-shaped' individuals. Those with a core capability – being a developer or business analyst might be your bread and butter – but increasingly we're hoping and expecting people to operate more widely.

Andy Smith: I completely agree. An example would be an old-fashioned business analyst who is tasked with a problem and comes up with a 50-page document which beautifully describes and codifies it. But I'd much rather they string together different web services to create a solution, fast. This is not the enterprise-grade solution, but it's a way of really bringing to life the experience we're trying to create for our users.

We’re interested in those people who can apply their technical skills or their analysis skills or their architecture skills to solving user problems, and who can come together in cross disciplinary teams.

Ed Halliday: I like that sense of minimising the speed of executing ideas, hacking together some kind of proof of concept rather than long pages documentation as might have been the norm 10 or 15 years ago.

Sophie Harrison: I think, as Andy says, working cross-functionally is vitally important. Rather than a business analysis taking a project to a delivery manager, who takes it to developers, who hand it over to testers... instead, the role then of the delivery managers is much less of the taskmaster. Instead, it's much more of the conductor of an orchestra that all needs to play together at the same time.So, let’s get delivery managers closer to testers, and testers closer to business analysts, so each have a stronger understanding of the problems we’re solving.

Working in technology, the only thing you can really expect is a certain amount of change, and so I suppose for anybody that's getting into a role in Technology, the skills you learn today and the first roles you have are going to be very different from what you do in the future. I think that's the appeal of the career and all we know for sure is we're definitely not going to be doing the same thing in 10 years’ time.

We’re interested in those people who can apply their technical skills or their analysis skills or their architecture skills to solving user problems, and who can come together in cross disciplinary teams.

Andy Smith: We organise people in product teams and what I want everyone in the product team to feel is to care about their product.

For example, if the product is not reliable, I want everyone in the product team to care about the fact that it's not reliable, and building on Sophie's point, every team member should look after some support tickets to get as close as possible to the product. Great people have a core skill set and bring the T-shape [generalist skills with a specific specialism], but they also actually bring a mindset which is actually that “it's my product and I'm motivated to make it work better or faster”

That means flexing across different roles and also empathising with and understanding better what other people next to them might be working on. I'm sure that really helps stimulate a much closer kind of working environment between teams

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And finally, what tech do you find particularly fascinating? What are you really excited out there in the world?

Andy Smith: For me on this, it’s the little things that I notice. It's I. I love it when there is actually really good, thoughtful design where technology anticipates the needs of the user. Even if that’s the trivial thing like you're entering a date and the tech guesses, when you put the beginning, what the end date might be.And then if it gets it wrong it actually learns about you.

I hate admin! I hate filling in forms and that kind of stuff and love tech that solves 90% of that problem and then uses the data in a really intelligent way.

Sophie Harrison: I’m pretty technology agnostic but, like Andy, I’m interested in anything that we can do to make people lives simpler and allow us to respond to change more quickly.

For example, building a catalogue of APIs that we can reuse.When researchers are beginning their research projects, they spend a huge amount of time trying to access the right data. I forget how much of the project, but it’s 70% of their time or more. So, imagine if we could provide them the data a little bit a little bit quicker, a little bit more easily, how much more effective they’d be at doing their research.

Andy Smith: I guess I have a benevolent view of sort of the role computers will play in the future –to complement humanity, not to not to replace it. We learned a lot during the pandemic. Having had previously very traditional ways of teaching students in classrooms, we all flipped online and offered teaching in a very different way.

So, in the future, how can we combine the two? What's the right balance of human-to-human interaction and how can we free humans up to do what they're really good at and get rid of a bunch of stuff that actually computers can do very well and augment our work appropriately?

Students like consuming certain things in an online format(rather than the traditional didactic lecture). What I want to continue to push at is really using computers to augment the experience and allowing humans the space – so in our case, brilliant academic humans to deal with our brilliant academic students and focus on their experience.

Ed Halliday: Yes absolutely. Stepping back from the nuts and bolts of actually the writing of the code and designing of tech based on human interaction and considering what is the ultimate goal that that human is trying to get to and how do we make that process from A to B to C as smooth and pain free as possible.

Thank you both so much for your time!

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