Project Deliverables: Planning the Case Study

The deliverables for the Smudie project were planned to be a detailed case study describing the project outcomes, together with this project blog which comments on the issues and actions leading to the delivery of those outcomes.
Tony Toole met with Dave White, the JISC project Critical Friend, in Oxford yesterday and part of the (wide-ranging and very helpful) discussion covered the potential content and structure of the case study.
The discussion to some extent was a mini brainstorming session and really represented the start of the case study planning process. It took into account the institutional changes taking place through the merger between Swansea Met and Trinity St David and the uncertainties about the future information systems plans resulting from this. As noted in previous posts in this blog, it has already been decided that the original plan for specific systems recommendations would now be inappropriate and that more generic proposals would be more useful. In fact, the outcomes of the Smudie project may actually have greater impact now as they will directly inform an ongoing change process.
The issue that was discussed at the meeting was the possible structure and content of the case study. The general conclusion was that key operational areas/functional components of the information management system could be targetted. The idea of identifying micro case study 'nuggets' was explored where key areas for improvement, identified by the 'as is' evaluation, would be developed. The key areas would be identified as being typical (and thus generic) for any institution and the solution adaptable as a result.
The additional benefit to the generic approach would be that the outcome would not only be of use to the newly emerging instiution as it develops its merged system solutions, it would also be of greater benefit to the wider JISC community as a transferrable project deliverable.

The discussion also concluded that a 'nugget' based case study would be more effective for consideration by senior management than any detailed inclusion of the modelling methods used to arrive at the proposed solutions. It was felt, however, that the modelling process, particularly the multi-model approach that combines the benefits of EA, VSM and SSM, would be of interest to that specialist area of action research. It was agreed that the dissemination of that outcome would be a useful additional project deliverable.