A word from the dean
Dear staff
At the most recent management meeting, we reviewed the status of the faculty's strategy. After the consultation and meetings of the management group, seven themes from the strategy have been selected, which we will work on in the first instance. The theme of leadership, well-being and involvement will be the focus of the management group's annual seminar in August, where we will discuss priorities and actions. This is a very broad topic, where we have great ambitions both as a result of the discussions about good management at SDU Science and the recommendations regarding co-determination and involvement from the Executive Board.
The topic of collaboration will be discussed in the Research Committee in week 20, where visibility and a long-term strategy for the infrastructure at the faculty are on the agenda together with a brainstorm on the development of collaboration with external partners. In addition, IMADA will present the first ideas to a cross-cutting center at SDU Science within AI and data-driven research.
In the field of education, discussions on the strategy take place primarily at the Education Committee's meetings, and here priority has been given to the non-core professional competencies that the Committee finds particularly important. There is broad agreement on four competencies: competency awareness, communication, interdisciplinarity and creativity. The further work consists of gaining a common understanding of these and identifying ways to approach these competencies in the faculty's programs.
Another theme deals with digitization processes. Here, a committee has been set up consisting of administrative staff across the faculty. Initially, it is primarily the roll-out of HR Stat that the committee will work with. However, a lot is happening in this area due to the many online activities that we have been working on over the past year. At the reboarding workshop last week, where leaders from the faculty participated, there were many who want to continue with online meetings in the future, and preferably hybrid meetings, where there are participants both physically and online. Here we need to find good methods to make it work. The management team is currently working on reorganizing management meetings and related material in Microsoft Teams and the faculty secretariat is working on developing formats for online meetings. Experiences from this will be shared with the rest of the faculty on an ongoing basis. These fall under the theme of digital competence development.
The sixth theme is co-creation, where the first co-creation project around scheduling has now been completed. Based on experience from this, a description of the process has been made and the next step is partly to increase knowledge of the method at SDU Science and partly to train employees who want to use the method for new co-creation processes. The group from the first project is just starting a new project around course descriptions. The preparation of the last theme concerning onboarding of new employees is expected to start in the autumn, but already now existing material is being collected from the departments, which will form the background for the theme.
You can always follow the work with the strategy on SDUnet. The site is under construction, but already contains a lot of information, which I hope you find interesting and can use in your everyday life at the faculty.
Marianne Holmer, dean