SHOWCASING GOOD PRACTICE WEEK 2026

In this session, the University of Manchester shares how its IT Services Directorate developed a strategic scenario game to strengthen planning, risk management and business continuity in a rapidly shifting sector.

The game brings senior leaders together to explore realistic “what if?” scenarios based on political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental trends.

Rather than predicting the future, the approach helps leaders stress-test strategic assumptions, spot blind spots and build shared readiness across planning, Governance Risk & Compliance and Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery.

Attendees will learn the method, the materials, what we’ve learned from running it with IT senior leadership, and how the approach can be adapted for planning teams in other institutions

This session will detail UCL’s journey in establishing the Technical Skills Development Hub (TSDH), a sector-first, centrally supported department designed to unify a historically fragmented community of over 1,000 highly skilled technical staff. We will share how we transformed technical talent management into a central institutional priority by securing University Management Committee (UMC) endorsement and using a data-driven approach based on our Technical Staff Survey.

The session will cover the practical implementation of the four pillars of the Technician Commitment, highlighting key outputs such as the new 'Technical Professionals Career Framework' and Authorship/Fair Attribution Guidelines/Annual Technical Showcase/Technical Professional of the years award. We will discuss the strategies that led to a rise in staff engagement from 15% to 52% and how this model can be adapted by other institutions to foster cross-institutional collaboration and inclusive development.

(This project was the winner of the HESPA Strategic Planning Award 2026). 

Manchester Met’s innovative People, Equality Data Framework (PEDF) allows us to track and monitor our progress against our commitments outlined in our Inclusive and Diverse Culture (IDC) Strategy, one of the enabling strategies for our Road to 2030 Strategy. This session will detail how Strategic Planning and HR co-created the data Framework in Power BI to address inequalities that exist for students and staff. The framework enables us to focus transparently on where improvements are needed to establish and maintain inclusive learning environments and workplaces for all. The session will explore the impact of the insight and how it is being used to drive forward our inclusive institution. The session will include an in-depth exploration of the data framework in Power BI and how we have integrated good practise standards to create accessible and powerful insight. 

Outline of the Emotional Signature™ model and methodology

Key findings for the University of Sunderland in London

Practical applications for the student experience - teaching, induction, and student support

This session will share learning from a series of course‑ and module‑level enhancement workshops developed collaboratively by the Data Insight and Curriculum Development teams at Kingston University. The workshops were designed to help academic staff engage confidently with quantitative student outcomes data by embedding it within a structured, dialogic curriculum enhancement process.

Rather than treating dashboards as endpoints, the approach encourages teams to “find the story” in their data: surfacing patterns, interrogating assumptions, and co‑constructing meaningful enhancement actions. The session will outline our approach, highlight the conditions that enable constructive and psychologically safe data conversations with academic teams, and demonstrate how combining analytics with collaborative reflection can lead to richer, more targeted improvements in learning, teaching, and assessment design.

Participants will take away practical approaches for supporting data‑informed decision‑making in academic teams and for strengthening the relationship between institutional insight, pedagogic practice, and curriculum planning.

The session will include an overview of how Heriot-Watt has used data to assess programme viability across all Schools. It will cover the data used, the key metrics for informing programme viability, how this data-driven mechanism was implemented and the impact it has had across the institution.

(This project has been awarded one of the Highly Commended certificates for the Data Story Award - HESPA Awards 2026)

This session will introduce the Narrative Commitment Task approach to the planning process and demonstrate how it has enabled a more seamless and consistent way of working across academic areas and professional services. By bringing planning into a single structured framework, the approach supports clearer alignment between local plans and the wider University strategy.

It will explore how the revised process encourages a stronger focus on strategic objectives, ensuring that commitments made during planning are explicitly linked to institutional priorities. The session will also show how the use of Power BI allows these commitments to be captured, monitored, and measured, providing greater transparency and enabling progress to be tracked at both local and institutional level.

This session will explore the journey we (University of Reading) have undertaken over the last 10 years to find and develop effective ways of sharing data with stakeholders, within a context of no central investment in enterprise-wide data software.

We will look at:

• Transitioning through technologies and workaround solutions
• Considering the stakeholder
• Designing a data hub without additional investment
• Challenges, successes and key takeaways

We will include a "show and tell" of our new data hub which is set in the MS environment using SharePoint and Power BI.

This session presents the redesign of the Time Allocation Survey (TAS) process through the TAPAS (Time Allocation Process Augmentation and Support) initiative. It will begin with an overview of TAS as a TRAC-compliant methodology used to estimate how academic staff allocate their time across teaching, research, and other activities, and its importance in informing institutional costing and reporting .

The session will then explore the rationale for transforming the existing TAS process, highlighting key challenges, including legacy dependencies, manual effort, limited transparency, and user-experience constraints. It will introduce the TAPAS solution, which leverages Qualtrics, Alteryx, and SQL Server to automate population selection, improve random allocation methods, and enhance data quality, auditability, and reporting capabilities.

Participants will gain insight into the end-to-end architecture of the new process, including survey design and distribution, data integration via APIs, workflow automation, and centralised data storage. The session will also demonstrate how statistical improvements, flexible population management, and embedded quality assurance checks contribute to more robust and reliable outputs.

Finally, the session will highlight the benefits of the new approach, such as increased efficiency, reproducibility, scalability, and improved user experience, and outline next steps for implementation and continuous improvement.

This session will outline how UCL introduced an evidence‑based Stage Zero process to strengthen programme viability, improve governance, and shift academic culture around new programme development. Historically, many proposals were brought forward on the strength of academic interest alone, with little consideration of student demand, market conditions, or financial sustainability. Stage Zero was designed to address this by building a structured, consistent approach to viability checks before any proposal progresses to formal approval.

We will explain how Planning, Marketing, and Finance work together to provide early market insight, financial modelling, and competitor analysis — supporting academics to refine ideas and preventing unviable or duplicative programmes entering the pipeline. We will also highlight how this differs from sector norms: while some institutions conduct basic market checks, many do not operate a coordinated approval model of this kind.

Through anonymised examples, we will show the practical impact: improved forward planning, clearer governance, better‑quality proposals, and a culture shift from “I want to run this programme” to “this programme is viable and sustainable”. The session will offer a simple, replicable process for institutions looking to build more strategic, data‑informed portfolio management.

The Understanding Successful Applicant Withdrawals project has been an innovative project bringing together complex data from a range of sources to develop a comprehensive understanding of a critical period of the student lifecycle. Withdrawals of successful applicants all the way from UCAS ‘Decline my place’ at Confirmation through to during their first year of study can now be analysed in a single place. The complex data has been visualised in an easy-to-understand way with segmentation by key characteristics. The project has facilitated improvements in student number planning, applicant and student support, Confirmation and Clearing, management of accommodation and financial forecasting.

The session will cover the full process we went through, from determining the time-period the project would focus on, establishing all the different ‘types’ of withdrawal possible during this period and where and in which systems the data associated with them is held, brining all the data together, and then visualising and presenting it to senior leaders and integrating into the planning process.

At the University of Manchester, we have developed a reporting application to understand our work force allocation, and to calculate the cost of delivering teaching. This initiative has, for the first time, provided clear insight into which activities academics spend their time on, which programmes are profitable and which are not, as well as enabling the analysis of trends and correlations through visual representations.

The report also identifies additional key areas for consideration, including highlighting academics who are overload/unloaded enabling a more equitable division of duties, research growth opportunities, and time spent on leadership activities.

Furthermore, the reporting framework has been designed to support multiple levels of the organisation, with outputs available at Faculty, School, Division, Programme, and Unit levels

In a sector awash with data, insights and market-led information, choosing a strategy to steer Portfolio direction under the umbrella of your HEI’s ambitions can be complex; compounded by strong headwinds, financial pressures, recruitment challenges and structural difficulties, setting a new or revised direction can be daunting.

At Falmouth University, we’ve continued to review our existing portfolio and used those outputs to generate our future direction; we have created a unique methodology to harbour large swathes of internal and external data relevant to us and the overall HE marketplace to swiftly pinpoint our strengths and weaknesses. Our whole Portfolio has been scrutinised empirically using datasets such as NSS, GOS Retention and Enrolment levels (plus, many more) and, plotted dynamically using our own index methodology; this energises each Faculty/ Subject and Course to understand the correlation between each metric, the causal relationship between them and, trending forwards, the most likely successful direction for the future.

This has generated a unique ‘rearward’ facing lens which pivots quickly into a ‘future-gazing’ tool; it is accurate, iterative and, in context of the needs of the HEI because, it relies on internally generated data pitted against external, open-source information.

This session covers the data types we use why, how we employ the information and rationalise to make it digestible and, how this method, in context is iterative and relevant to your specific institution; at pace, the internal data we carry and external data we are exposed to can be energised into meaningful, value-led outcomes viable at senior-strategic level.

This session dives into two major Strategic Projects at Manchester Met — the International College and Hyflex initiatives — showcasing how even the best‑planned projects encounter surprises. We’ll explore the real-world issues and risks that surfaced along the way and share how effective project management enabled teams to anticipate, respond, and ultimately turn challenges into success stories.

The session will then reveal how these experiences directly shaped and strengthened our Project Management Office's tools and ways of using them. From refreshed best‑practice guidance in the form of a dynamic project plan, Plan on a Page and a new Risk Log, delegates will see how lessons learned were translated into practical tools that raise the quality and consistency of current and future projects across our Portfolio.

BCU has achieved type 3 (causal) evidence of the efficacy of our Package of Assessment Redesign, which is now being upscaled enterprise-wide via BCU’s new Education Strategy.

This presentation will provide an overview of our evaluation findings and methodology (Difference-in-Differences quasi-experimental design) while exploring the steps to success, essential to impactful intervention evaluation in higher education, including: proximity of evaluators to institutional data, inter-departmental collaboration for data collection and development of evaluation tools, academic engagement for robust methodological and statistical oversight, and securing and maintaining senior buy-in for enhanced risk and change management through effective exploitation of policy and data insights.