So I'm Raja Javaid. I'm the Chief Information and Transformation Officer.

When you came to Warwick what did you hope to achieve?

When I came to Warwick, you know, the first thing I picked up on was the immense amount of passion, pride and commitment that I saw across all of our colleagues. And equally, and sadly, I was disappointed to hear when people said processes were clunky, when I heard that systems didn't work effectively, when I heard, people didn't feel they were empowered and those two things didn't work in harmony for me.

And the Warwick Transformation programme was set up to really address a lot of those things. It was set up to review all of the processes that we have in Professional Services. It was there to have a look at all of the tools that we've got and resolve the fragmented approach of those tools, that makes our work difficult. And it was about enabling our people to be the very best at what they do, and that is what Warwick Transformation is there to do, it’s to look at bringing all those three strands together and accelerate us into the future.

Is this led by UEB and how are you going to support?

So Warwick Transformation is a UEB (University Executive Board) led initiative. I've been empowered to lead the programme as the accountable UEB member. But it is the collective UEB that owns this initiative. And we all recognise that this is going to be a challenging period for a lot of our people. It's going to be difficult because we're going to be saying change the way you transact X, Y, or Z.

And we're acutely aware that we need to be listening. But on top of that, we are also consumers of those services. And we also have our own frustrations and concerns about some of the ways that we transact. So both as leaders and as consumers of that service, we are very committed to delivering this programme to success.

What does that transformation process look like?

So at the start point, we always start at looking at a segment of the professional services e.g. I.T. and we look at what is the view of what I.T. could look like / should look like for a modern university. And it does a baseline of what it looks like today. And in essence it creates a gap analysis at that point and it understands what are the layers of activities that team does.

So it looks at the processes that we transact. It looks at the data flows. It looks at the tools that we use. And then it looks at the structure in terms of organisational structure. And it creates a view that says this is what that future function could look like and this is the implementation plan for it.

How are you going to keep us updated and what is the overall outcome?

So as we go through this period, it's really important that you feel comfortable in speaking out, sharing your thoughts and your feedback. And I can assure you that we will do everything we can to provide regular communication with you, on the progress across the review.

At the end of this, what we will have is empowered people, simple processes, effective tools, and a career path opportunity for those that wish to accelerate their career across the University.

We do a lot of great work as we start today. We are going to go through a period of change which is going to look at doing things differently. What we’ll deliver as an outcome is a modern professional services that will help our continual growth and accelerate for the further 60 years of our history.