Digital professionals have always sought to influence the critical decisions that shape services and products in their organisations, but that influence feels considerably less palpable in the face of today’s challenges.

Change is coming

The midway point of the year is a good time to step back and look at the evolving landscape of higher education (and the unknown beyond the horizon) with a pragmatic view.

Andrew Greenway’s important blog post from September 2024: has been on my mind for the past few months. And there was the start of the academic year, with rippling throughout the sector and .

There is an overwhelming sense that more is yet to come and the rate of change demands a response. The crucial question for Higher Ed digital professionals isn’t just how to embrace it, but whether our current approaches are enough to make a meaningful impact. , it’s clear there are many good examples of best practice in the sector. These efforts consistently yield useful outcomes, but they are predominantly directed at small-scale, non-holistic improvement.

I agree that it’s important to start somewhere, but is this this really enough to affect the kind of change Andrew referred to?

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with , on the question of whether higher education institutions are even capable of frequent, incremental change. Does digital transformation in our sector instead require a ‘juggernaut’ event? One large, unstoppable effort that forces change through sheer momentum.

While conventional wisdom favours the incremental approach, our experiences with programmes like OneWeb challenge its applicability, especially given the unique operational realities of universities.

Operational realities

Universities are like connected tissues

Universities are complex organisms. To affect one thing, you need to understand all the other moving parts. This is particularly true for institutions that strive to balance their teaching, research, and business activities.

Developing digital solutions for individual departments is (relatively) manageable. The complexity emerges when a university attempts to unify these elements within a single digital framework.

That framework has to align with teaching, research, and business operations (the ‘holy trinity’), accommodate their interconnected needs and conflicts, and support the intricate network of information that flows between each area.

Navigating the institutional labyrinth

Navigating the traditional hierarchies and siloed departments of higher education is an unenviable challenge. Digital professionals are (necessarily) adept at stakeholder engagement, but these efforts are impeded by organisational structures that prevent clear communication and efficiencies.

Planning for the tangible, like costs and milestones, is one thing. Navigating the complex web of stakeholder interests, motivations, and emotions that shape transformative decisions is quite another.

Faced with so much complexity, is it more effective to pursue a bold, comprehensive transformation in a key area (as with our OneWeb programme)? Or should we opt for smaller, self-contained initiatives, even if they lack depth of research and development?

Iterative transformation

The default for many, including ourselves in the past, has been incremental. Agile methodology focuses on iterative change, typically starting with a minimal viable product (MVP) and building from there with clear intent to deliver a product that meets user needs directly according to their feedback.

Changes are driven by users, allowing for designs that better address pain points.

This approach relies on cross-functional teams and frequent iteration to deliver value. When successful, it ensures the business delivers the right thing for its customers, with problems resolved much sooner than with a single grand launch.

The University never sleeps

Mark and I used to frame the ever-changing operational challenges and demands at Southampton as: ‘the University never sleeps’. Everything, everywhere, is a top priority – all the time.

Agile and iterative approaches cannot fix issues with prioritisation, but they have allowed us to respond quickly to changing needs – a flexibility that proved crucial during the pandemic. These practices reduce risk by reducing work into smaller phases, which allow for quicker course correction in unpredictable times.

But it isn’t without its drawbacks.

While incremental change is arguably safer and more flexible, the overall pace can feel too slow to keep up with institutional needs and competing demands from multiple areas. How long can you keep the faith when small teams, equipped for small changes, are destined to serve on multiple fronts?

Resistance is futile

Digital transformation in higher education is no longer just a strategic advantage. It is a competitive necessity.

Institutions must leave their comfort zones and invest boldly in initiatives that disrupt the old ways of doing business, which could mean adopting new models, integrating advanced technologies, or partnering with external organisations to leapfrog the competition.

There’s always the risk of falling behind.

In many higher education institutions, transformation efforts falter due to organisational inertia: the reluctance to adopt new technologies or rethink established structures. This goes beyond addressing minor inefficiencies and speaks to a deeper issue: the current system may simply be too ineffective and unresponsive to fix. It needs to be transformed to meet both internal and external demands, and to adapt rapidly to ongoing changes.

Crucially, we must also acknowledge that transformative ideas have an expiration date. True periods of transformation – like political ideas – occur every 20-30 years before running their course. As highlights, we tend to fit what we see into our existing ideas. We are undeniably in one of these critical moments now, and there’s no telling where will settle.

Transformative periods can be catalysed when leaders recognise current systems are beyond simple repair, and embrace an era of profound change. This means clearly defining which ideas have expired and adopting a new, unified stance. Otherwise, we risk superficial reforms that lead back to square one, with no lasting impact.

Overcoming these barriers requires decisive investment and action. Each of these could be a blog post in its own right, but here they are as starting points:

Invest in a culture of continuous improvement

Foster trust and support staff through continuous investment in the maintenance and development of digital services, and the teams behind them. This addresses anxieties about autonomy and counters self-sabotaging behaviours.

Secure unwavering leadership commitment

Visible, accountable leadership plays a critical role in removing obstructions to progress. Without it, resistance is here to stay.

Mandate cross-functional collaboration

Break down silos by investing in interdisciplinary teams, improved communication channels, and even reshaping organisational structures for greater agility.

Re-engineer core business processes

Digital transformation is more than new tech. It demands a fundamental redesign of everything that underpins the technology: workflows, data flow, communications, and more. This requires service thinking far beyond IT.

Develop dedicated teams and expertise

Address skill gaps and resource limitations by funding and developing in-house digital capabilities, rather than treating these as a one-off expense.

Success here ultimately hinges on how well an organisation moves beyond merely managing resistance, and breaks through it entirely to achieve the transformative change our sector requires. This is fundamental in turning stalled efforts into impactful and lasting institutional evolution.

There’s a word for bold initiatives that launch successfully, but don’t stick the landing:

Any guesses?

Change is constant

Pioneering a large, ambitious programme like OneWeb was never going to be easy for us. From the outside, the project might have seemed to be about a new website, but in truth, it involved substantial, unglamorous work beneath the surface.

The scale, ambition, and disruptive nature of such an undertaking carried the potential for game-changing impact, albeit with risk. The lessons learned, though hard-won, will prove invaluable for our long-term digital vision and asset development… as long as we commit to it.

OneWeb may have had incremental aspects to it, but the project was grounded in a larger vision that aimed for evolution, not revolution. This was no small feat and replicating such an approach at scale (or even sustaining its existing benefits) remains challenging. The importance of maintaining digital services long after their initial launch cannot be overstated; it is fundamental to realising their strategic value.

Considering the current pressures, it’s notable that such comprehensive models haven’t been more widely adopted. Broader uptake would enable institutions to implement their own scaled versions more rapidly and cost-effectively. While many players are becoming active in this space, few have undertaken the complete end-to-end journey and gained the associated deep learning.

This brings us back to the central question… and yes, for today’s higher education sector, the ‘juggernaut’ approach may be the most appropriate.

For digital practitioners, this means maintaining a big-picture perspective while you capitalise on the smaller wins.

Taking bold steps, backed by real investment, is key. This isn’t just about overcoming barriers, it’s about accelerating transformation to ensure lasting success, helping our institutions become more adaptable, innovative, and ready for what lies ahead. Many of the ideas that served us well have now expired, and the first step is to move past denial.

Perhaps the most exciting opportunity, our collective North Star, is to expand on the excellent work already done. Leveraging the user-led systems, services, and assets we’ve created to date will help us de-risk further investment, and build more extensively on established foundations.

Here’s to building that future, together.

My sincere thanks to Jonny for his contribution and suggestions.

If the alpha phase were a theatre staging rehearsals, screen prototypes would be the main event on the stage. They are the visible sign of what visitors would see.

The prototypes we’ve developed in the alpha were led by our user experience and interaction designers. They show how we’d make it easy for anybody reading a news article to connect with the academic experts important to the stories. We’d found huge latent demand for this in our ������Ƭy research.

Prototyping goes beyond what the website visitor sees when they get to a news article, however. It covers how they even stumble across the article in the first place.

Our Digital UX team also worked back-stage, to continue the metaphor, on prototyping ways we might organise news on the site. So that visitors come across news articles that will be helpful to them to make fruitful connections.

What we did back-stage so the right news is shown in the right places

We developed the idea of having one news index page, to try to solve the problem that most news sections are little found. We worked together, with our SEO (search engine optimisation) manager devised a format for web addresses and our UX designers developed an idea for a filter.

This way, we’d have an index that’s easily found, and when a visitor arrives they can easily call up only the articles for one department or centre.

At the same time, we were thinking about all those visitors who’d never seek out news, but who might be helped in their tasks by some categories of news. So our content designer and senior analyst also audited news content and explored data on journeys where some news might be useful. We found:

• that researchers’ looking to collaborate took journeys lacking information on opportunities and who to contact
• that there was a potentially related behaviour from over 84,000 visitors a year to click in, and out, of several staff profiles
• that some categories of news could fill the gaps in information on who could help these visitors if placed in their journeys through the site
• a taxonomy could help to place useful news content in these journeys

For example, the University announced last year was that we’d set up a new institute to work on ensuring ‘artificial intelligence for good’. Our research area, institute and staff profile pages do not make clear who to contact about the opportunity to collaborate on this. We asked ourselves: how might news content help in scenarios like this?

Designing how to showcase news in journeys across the University website

Our user experience professionals grappled with how and where we’d give research pages visitors previews of news content that might help with their tasks.

We needed to surface the value relating to their task of finding work to collaborate on. But we needed to do this without getting in the way of users searching for different things. We sketched how a ‘teaser card’ might indicate a collaboration opportunity, rather than assuming visitors will find news valuable.

We found in testing that flagging fleeting announcements in the middle of permanent content on what a department or centre offers might confuse. The teaser would need to both clearly be a news article, but also clearly show how it is related to collaboration.

In addition, giving a preview of a number of articles might be obstructive for those on mobile devices, magnifying or listening to content, as they have to spend more time scrolling through irrelevant content.

Thinking about how to help publishers to tease the right shows

This made our other back-stage work, improving the authoring experience for news publishers, all the more important. We explored whether a simple taxonomy and content management system fields could give publishers control over what is, and is not, previewed to users on department and centre pages.

As one stakeholder said: “You want these categories so that you can feed the right content to the right people.”

We need to engage stakeholders further on this in the next phase of the project. So that we do not take a billboard-plastering approach to the many news ‘productions’ publishers will be able to stage with our screen prototypes. Instead, we carefully curate news content based on what different visitor groups might engage with.

With thanks to product, analyst and user experience colleagues who I worked closely with on the show!

A year ago we launched OneWeb with a mission to create new digital services and products for our many users.

Remember this? Gorgeous Italian sponge cake with a light meringue cream

We did a lot in a year and a lot has changed since we started – we have had to flex, pivot and course-correct more times than I can count (and this was always the plan). All I would say is that delivering our programme with agility means also leading on change and making some brave decisions in the open, in front of stakeholders, team members and end-users alike.

As we celebrate our 1st birthday, I thought I’d look back on some key pivot moments and lessons we’ve learned as an agile change programme.

Teams

From a small team of specialists working in Highfield Campus, we have now become an eclectic bunch of user-centred design professionals including:

• content designers,
• user researchers,
• service designers,
• developers,
• UX designers
• delivery and product managers,
• and more!

We are dispersed across several locations, including embedded teams in faculties and departments during particular delivery phases.

Not everything was right when we started (but we couldn’t know what we didn’t know). We had no room to grow, no walls to share our thinking, the structure wasn’t quite right, and all we wanted was to share the same space and create a buzz for delivery.

We had to adapt our team’s structure more than once over the past year in response to changing needs of the programme, and luckily we had the built-in autonomy to do so. Every phase we enter creates its own challenges and, although to an outsider there is probably an air of organised chaos, our ability to change quickly is critical in allowing teams to feel empowered, collaborative and ready to deliver.

In an ideal world we would have liked to deliver from one place, but this was not an option. So instead of physical co-location we try our hardest to create a common purpose to make sure that relationships can form and we can still learn from one another.

Processes

If your programme involves internal processes that were not designed for the digital age, or with the end-user in mind, you are more than likely to find out about it when you start looking beneath the bonnet of your digital service.

We had many ‘anxiety inducing moments’ (thank you Kate!) when reviewing our vast amount of content and all the missed opportunities associated with them.

This has been the most common feature of our delivery so far. Literally every time we try and address an issue, there is a greater problem lying underneath.

The iceberg metaphor is like an iceberg. (via @simulo)

So, if your service relies on good data, or involves a new API, or needs content to explain a process – rest assured that your team will find out about it in no time.
And to allow all of these to be successful from a digital delivery point of view, you must have some good basics in place:

• a good strategy,
• a cast iron proposition,
• governance

And when you need to find a solution and it’s not clear how you can solve the problem upfront, an agile approach encourages you to pick the simplest part of your goal to deliver quickly. This way we can learn from the results, iterate, or fail quickly and cheaply.

Stakeholders

We have some really great stakeholders who love getting involved and collaborating with us as part of the programme. Telling the story of change to stakeholders is hard – it requires pivoting on an almost daily basis. The truth is that creating change is dependent on stakeholders who are willing to be the agents of change within their organisation. At times there is too much accountability (i.e. everybody owns a piece of this), and at times, there is too little (i.e. we can’t find an owner for this).

One of the challenges is creating the ‘just the right amount’ of change for an organisation. And the university is certainly no different. It is the ‘Goldilocks principle’ – but that’s another presentation!

We’ve focused on driving change, leading teams, managing up, managing down, managing side-ways, managing diagonally, convincing some stakeholders that ‘digital’ is a thing, and convincing others that there is no point investing in the next shiny but ineffective thing… all whilst trying to be very helpful to leaders and make our point… – mission impossible! It takes a lot of perseverance and emotional resilience, as well as the ability to earn trust quickly with many different types of stakeholders.

In a large and complex organisation there are always competing priorities and if people don’t like what they see, they will find a way to tell us. As ever, this is as much a social project as a technology and design one!

Technology

Things can always go wrong, no matter what approach you take. If it’s cheap to fail, why not try it out? That’s the mantra of agile methodology after all.

When you’re facing problems, you need to take inventory of your resources. Whether your current strategic challenges were predictable or unexpected, you must know what you have and what you’ll need moving forward.

So we had to do some thinking and rethinking of technology choices in between phases. Mainly because we needed to think beyond programme funding, availability of specialists and the experience in teams across the University. These factors can often be overlooked.

Sometimes needs and abilities dictate situations and help you and your team bring more to the table, and this is what we had to do in relation to our technology choices. We picked up the best bits from our first creation (and there are plenty of good bits), learned what worked and what didn’t and applied it to a new solution that can be scaled in a cheaper way for our University.

������Ƭ pandemic

As the business owner of OneWeb, I can’t afford the luxury of assuming anything will go smoothly. It’s essential to prepare for external forces that threaten your programme and organisation, and also to prepare yourself and your team to deal with them.

Maybe I was naive, but I never thought that I would have to plan for a global pandemic in the first year of our existence. In the wake of the emerging coronavirus situation, getting remote working right became the next new pivot.

Photo by ���Dz���

Agile doesn’t mean unplanned. As a co-located team, a lot of what we already had in place could also work as a fully remote team whilst we are all social distancing in our homes. But how do you make agile work when teams can’t be teams?

We work in sprints: short, time-boxed periods when the delivery team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are at the very heart of agile, so we worked extra hard with delivery managers to get sprints right so that our teams could continue to deliver better products with fewer headaches. Sprints also help each team to see how they are contributing to the overall delivery goals and ensuring that what they are focusing on is a priority.

If teams are no longer co-located, there can be a big shift in how people think about their productivity. For remote working to be successful you have to be clear what outcomes the teams are contributing towards. The delivery engine has to be extremely efficient and the product visions have to be clear. But most of all, there has to be trust and everyone needs to be on the same page. We’re apart, not alone.

Nimble, confident, proactive management

Some final parting notes. It’s not that we have anything against waterfall, but in a time of great uncertainty, agile means that I can help to dispel anxiety by gathering my team during a crisis, communicating, and putting our problem-solving skills into practice. Dramatic changes will happen – always. However, good detailed planning and a measured response to prevent collapse is what agile is able to offer you.

Nimble, confident, proactive management. Do the hard work, to keep delivery simple.

A bit about me

Hi there!

I’m Sarah, a recent graduate of the Games Design and Art programme at Winchester School of Art (WSA). I spent 2 years on the Graphic Arts programme before transferring to Games Design, where I applied a further user-centred approach to my design work. My interest in user experience design stemmed from a short-term project with a London-based product design studio during my degree; where I discovered the lean UX process and found that this could also be applied to games. This led to my research focus for my , addressing the need of bridging tactile games and technology.

I discovered the OneWeb programme through the Digital Team blog, exploring the recent work with the undergraduate and postgraduate course pages. I was really interested to see a user-focused approach within the University’s marketing and expressed interest in getting involved. This has seen me join the team as a UX design intern and getting stuck into the live project.

What has been good

My internship so far has involved me working within the Student Experience Team researching and designing around the ‘what it is like to live in…’ pages. The team have been extremely welcoming and are well experienced, it has been a pleasure to be able to get involved with their work.

Image: our student experience team ‘in-action’

This has seen me experiencing agile development through processes such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups and retrospectives. I’ve found these to be really helpful with organising and communicating with the team and ultimately reflect often about my completed work and how to adapt my working practices in further sprints.

Recently I’ve been able to interact with current students through a series of design workshops, to gain a better understanding of their retrospective needs and desires for the website. I was able to take part in one of the sessions as a participant and then later as a moderator in another session. This challenged me to continually encourage students to dive deep into their experiences and feelings, thinking about open-ended questions to establish these conversations.

Image: some design wireframes created by students 

I have also taken part in a make-and-do workshop with the team, which gave me opportunities to communicate ideas and approaches that can support both prospective students and business needs to the rest of the team. As an alumna from Winchester School of Art, I have been able to fill knowledge gaps about the Winchester student experience, demonstrating its differing culture. This has been useful in how we address the separate campuses within the living pages.

From these research and make-and-do sessions I have started to explore my core role as a UX designer on the team, by creating ideas for map assets that can be utilised across the living pages. These designs will give a sense of a visual picture for prospective students with potential to point out current student experiences at icon pinpoints. This has also made me explore a filtration system from ideas such as category selection to search based terms. By carrying out this task I am understanding better how to communicate key interactions and how they will interact with new and existing content.

What has been difficult?

While taking part in both the student and team-based workshops there have been many opportunities to feedback ideas to conclude the sessions. These have been imperative to our development of sprints and, whilst contributing, I’ve found these daunting, giving an overview and not delving deep into the ‘whys’ of each decision. This is something I hope to practice more through further team workshops as well as meetings, which I have confidence in due to the friendly nature of the team.

What would I like to do more of?

I’m looking forward to exploring more component design, such as the maps component that will be used across living pages. I’m finding the interactive design elements to be challenging and want to find further solutions to satisfy user stories. From this I also hope to become involved with prototyping to get a sense of how these components work within the architecture, multiple page levels and visual design. I would also like to continue the collaborative design work we do as a team to establish key goals and approaches of components, as they have greatly aided my individual design work with the maps component.

How can people get involved?

The OneWeb blog has been a great tool for me to understand the different sections of the programme and I highly recommend checking out the posts to understand the team’s ongoing developments. There are lots of opportunities to contribute to the OneWeb team whether that be through usability testing, workshops, Show and Tells or joining our team. There are regular jobs and internships posted through the University, which are great opportunities to apply for and become part of this creative, user-centred team.

As part of the programme, we are constantly considering how we get more students involved with our teams. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch.

Our team already consists of Content, Design, Research, Product, Development and Delivery roles.

2019 has been an incredibly exciting year for us. We’ve grown and changed in ways I didn’t think were possible. We’re looking to accelerate (as well as consolidate) activities in 2020, and therefore we need some more new talent to join our multidisciplinary team!

We’re looking for people who:

• are passionate and care about the end-users
• able to roll up their sleeves to help us transform digital services for many of our user groups at the university
• are inquisitive and not afraid to challenge the status-quo
• can bring the inspiration needed to deliver digital services that will influence our sector and help our university succeed with pride
• can tell a story by using evidence and insights to make a positive impact on our users
• can work as part of a dynamic and multi-disciplinary team
• are therefore essentially unicorns

Image caption: Always be yourself unless you can be a unicorn. Then always be a unicorn.

A bit about us

We’re a nice bunch of people who really care about what we do. We have some truly exceptional individuals working for us, both in our teams and the university at large.

Image: OneWeb team – 1 April 2019

OneWeb as a programme is in its first year, so as we grow (fast), everything changes. It is – the idea that as a team grows, everything changes at roughly every third and tenth step. The things that work for a team of 3 people are very different to what works for a team of 10 people or 30 people. This has been very true for us. So how we communicate, collaborate and so on is constantly evolving.

I will be honest – we’re still finding our feet in terms of the team’s culture and ways of working, but we are already making a difference.

Where possible, we try and stick to the following principles to ensure our team’s culture is both welcoming and inclusive, so that everyone can thrive doing the best work of their careers:

• Work in the open and share our work with the rest of our colleagues (in and outside our teams) as often as we possibly can
• Collaborate as much as we can with our users, stakeholders and of course our teams
• Build in accountability as part of our ways of working – taking responsibility for our achievements and failures, celebrating success and making change for the better
• Be honest, impartial, objective and act with integrity. Basically, be bold.

We’re recruiting

If what I’ve just described above excites you, and you think that it sounds like something you’d like to be part of, please get in touch.

We want to meet with other people who want to work in this way.

Sounds great – how do I apply?

• All the jobs we’re currently recruiting for are on the .
• If you’re interested in working for us, and you’ve read the job description, please register with the website, and complete the application form.
• Please pay attention to the closing date and the week we’re planning to conduct some interviews.
• We’re planning to shortlist candidates quickly and inform you as fast as we can if you have been successful.

Credit: : You’re magic

Still unsure?

If you want to talk first, please get in touch with any questions. If you are unsure about whether to apply, want to recommend someone else, or just talk through the roles, please contact , Head of Digital and OneWeb’s Business Owner via or .

A challenging and exciting mission awaits for those unicorns who are not afraid of hard work and standing out.

So much has happened in just 8 months (we officially formed on April 1st, and this was not a joke ) so I wanted to talk candidly about the work we’ve delivered, what was challenging and not so shiny, as well as all the good bits we’ve celebrated that are worth sharing publicly. Here’s five of them:

Change programmes are short-lived, intensive things

For any of you who might be thinking, “great, we got our funding, and we can start”, all I’ll say is that everything is always a lot harder, tougher and messier, because change is inherently hard to implement. This is especially true if your organisation is large, complex, has internal processes that are not fit for the Internet-era, and your programme has a fixed amount of time to make a true difference (before stakeholders lose interest). One important thing we have learned this year is that we can create a safe environment in which those conditions will flourish in the face of such challenges.��

Diligent prioritisation is essential in delivering value for users and stakeholders alike, and we constantly need to evaluate (and reevaluate) the scope to ensure that our implementation is achieving this.��

That’s not an easy thing to do. Especially if your teams are dispersed across locations and many of them are new, getting used to the University as well as each other.�� So although things are not perfect (when are they ever?) we managed, for example, to embed Product roles as part of our work. This has enabled us to represent the University’s interests, the needs of the user, and prioritise these needs to project teams. This means that our work can give better return on investment to the University, leading to better quality products to the user.

Bringing digital services around user needs is a thing  

You know you’ve made a real impact when, out of nowhere, you hear your own words spoken back to you in a meeting, or when you notice a valued colleague (that might have not always been on your side) using your own terminology about user needs, data or culture.��

We have a lot of stuff to do for the next three years, and time is of the essence. We need to establish core services and assets for the University. And realistically, not everyone will buy into what we are trying to do, so we understand the need to challenge ourselves every now and again about what we are meant to do when things don’t quite fit together.��

One conclusion is that not everything in life is meant to fit together nicely. Sometimes there could be something right in front of your eyes that is already working, and all you need to do is find a way to scale and repurpose it in a slightly different way than originally intended. We’re finding examples as such in education-related work, designing end-to-end experiences, but also some great examples from enterprise and research discoveries. We have found that, often enough, the best way to progress is by identifying practices that already work in our organisation, finding out what is good about them and then working to amplify it. To give you a real-world example, we have seen exactly this with our approach to staff profiles (currently in Alpha) where we have focused on solving the user needs problems while also finding efficiencies around existing sources of the truth.��

This is why discoveries are important – they may tell you something you already know (but save you time and money in investing in something that will not help), or they may bring up new opportunities to investigate, or even a few old ones that are worth exploring further.��

Forming a team takes a long, long time

I changed a lot of things in 2019 and my team bore the brunt of these changes. We needed to change the way we worked in order to start delivering quickly for our University. For me, it meant a long-term recruitment strategy and operational plan, and working very closely with HR, Procurement and Finance partners on an almost weekly basis.��

This work is ongoing, and I cracked the back of it (processes, business cases etc.), but what was important to me was that there was an acknowledgement that in order to deliver change you have to make changes to structure and roles. More on this in my first January 2020 blog post!��

But what did this mean to my team?

Well, the Digital Team had to adapt quickly and change its way of working. The OneWeb programme gave new opportunities to teams and other internal staff within the University. But when new appointments were made as part of the programme, it created a domino effect in other parts of the University and especially my own department.��

We also had to change the way we work. We might have been a team before, but there is a world of difference between ‘being a team’ and ‘working as a team’. Delivering the project using agile methodology means fundamentally changing the manner in which we think and operate, in a way that is also right for our University. As such, directly copying successful models from other organisations that are going through similar journeys isn’t always the right way to go for us. I won’t claim that we’ve nailed it by any means, and we might yet face other challenges and concerns, but what I can say that the strategy of building internal capabilities is working.��

I would also add that moving people around can create unnecessary anxieties and dramas. If you want to maintain  a motivated team in times of upheaval, it’s vital that you take time explaining your thinking and rationale for the changes. One-to-one conversations in-person help too. Always consult where you can.

Relationships in and outside the team really matter

We have a lot of disciplines and people on the team. Some are new, some are very experienced and it’s not given that people will necessarily work well together. Working ‘as a team’ means that we all have something to bring to the table, that people have complementary skill-sets, and of course that they basically all get on with each other. Without these, it is extremely difficult to get stuff done in a positive way.��

It is not unusual for big programmes to have issues with working as a team. There have been many discussions about ‘Discipline blindness’ – “the inability to see things through any lens other than that of our own discipline”– Ade Adewunmi.��

Ade says that in new or less experienced teams, this can sometimes lead to stand-offs which result in the whole team getting bogged down. Sometimes even the most competent and experienced people on your team could be most affected.��

This is where one of our rules – “the user holds the trump card” – is used to mitigate. Whatever delivers the best value for the user, quickly and effectively, is what we go with.��

We’re not quite there with our guiding principles, but there have been a few that formed organically as we started working. Bringing in Product Managers (Owners) has really helped with this.

Breaking silos

The point of digital is to change things. It is about collaboration and working with many other functions at our University. What we do, create and implement has an impact that will be felt elsewhere in the organisation. We saw this with the launch of the Undergraduate course pages. It was fascinating to watch how many parts of our organisation came together to solve a last-minute problem that could have impacted our launch. We don’t often shout enough about it, but because we are changing the ways we create (digital) products, and because we are trying to tackle legacy, truly un-sexy problems around systems and data, we must collaborate much more closely with different groups of stakeholders and break the siloed way of working.�� 

Now, one key takeaway for me and the rest of my management team is that if we’re asking people to do something that challenges pre-existing university ways of doing things, we need to support our teams and others through that. We’re not done when the team is formed.

I changed

I learned a lot about myself this year. There were many, many good and wonderful days, and there were some very dark ones too. Trying to hold effectively two positions, occasionally in a complete contradiction – Head of Digital and Business Owner for OneWeb Programme – has been an interesting and personal challenge. It also forced me to dig deep for personal and emotional resilience that I didn’t know I had.��

There were a lot of personal sacrifices from many people, not just me. We hired new people, we lost some good people, we had to think about problem-solving in a creative and different way, , and my team had to learn new skills on their feet, which sounds cool, but in reality is also very hard. We’ve all earned our badges of honour.��

All of it with good reason though – because (thank you Mark!) “transformation is a window and an opportunity that won’t exist perpetually. And resilience can’t always be sustained indefinitely.” Which is why we need to gain ground now, persevere and continue with the plan.�� 

Bring it on, 2020

I haven’t covered everything the team got up to here. We also wrote many blogs this year, from the launch of our UG pages to our discovery work, and more will be released soon. We also shared our roadmap with you all and published Show & Tells on the University’s OneWeb . There’s a lot more work that we’ve just finished or are about to finish which isn’t public yet, but will be soon… 

With all of this in mind, and from the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to thank everyone who has been part of our 2019 – teams, departments and colleagues from across the University. We look forward to seeing you again in the new year and working with more of you to help us make user-friendly digital services the new normal!��

After the whirlwind of 2019, we’re excited to see what 2020 brings! We’ll be back on 2 January.

If you’re celebrating, we wish you happy holidays and season’s greetings!

My thanks to and for their thoughts, suggestions and, most of all, their improvements to this post.��

Building the new from the old

We’ve started with the most used and visited content, and we will continue to design new services and systems – gradually and to an agreed plan. This means turning our focus to Admissions, closely followed by Research, and then building out to cover all areas of the University. We need to move quickly, but systematically, to build the new from the old.

Why now?

Digital technologies are fundamentally changing how people and organisations work together.

The University’s ongoing success depends on our ability to reconfigure everything we do around our users – learning from their activity and using data to understand how they find and use digital services, so that we can feed these back into responsive service design.

So what’s next

We’ve been working on the roadmap for Y2. There are two ingredients to success: good planning and good execution.

Here are some more details and thoughts of where we’re heading:

In the 16 weeks that made OneWeb Y1, we learned lots about joining up content. We started small and scaled up with the undergraduate course pages, creating the first building blocks to new technology. We’ve built a platform that can both publish content and pull it directly from university data sources, to ensure pages are accurate, optimised and relevant to users. We also investigated, in detail, the PGT admission journeys and looked at ‘R����𲹰�����’ as a whole.

Even in this short space of time, it has become clear that we can create digital services and products within the University that drive our business objectives, by meeting our users’ needs.

It’s also about choice

Well-designed digital services are more accessible to all users, whoever they are. For example, voice recognition and virtual assistants can improve access for some people with disabilities. They can also bring services closer to those living in remote areas, or other parts of the world. This can improve the power of our messages and reduce the time and cost of travelling to and from a university campus.

We have to ensure that our products can be easily used by as many people as possible.

At the same time, we know that some people cannot access or use digital services at all. We will continue to offer choice for everyone. Our users will be able to interact with us online through their favourite device, by phone or by visiting us.

Our vision

Being a world-leading university means changing how we do things for our users digitally. Everything has to work better.

To do that we will:

• provide coherent services that are easy to discover and use
• help the University communicate with authority and trust
• make great digital and user-centred publishing easy
• make our content easy to re-use and build on

It’s going to be a busy year for OneWeb, in which we’re going to change both how we do things and set a faster pace. Exciting, but it also means we have to engage with a lot more stakeholder groups.

Y2 roadmap (2019/20) is a combination of tactical, achievable, visible bits of work, alongside longer-term ‘foundations for transformation’ work. It will stretch us, but the reward will be worth it – southampton.ac.uk will be an even greater example of how universities should serve users.

Here are some thoughts on execution.

Our roadmap

It is tempting to divide the roadmap by projects as we often do. However, we decided to theme these instead because it makes sense for our teams, and to show the breadth and commonality between streams of the programme:

������Ƭing things

This work builds on the knowledge gained from discoveries and user journeys; what our teams have learned from education content and the PGT and Research discoveries. This could be about finding a course, facility, research group, a person, and much more.

Once more content has been created in a new platform, there is a lot of room for improvement for the site search. We heard that one of the biggest frustrations for our external and internal users is not being able to find what they’re looking for. Internal and external search are two ways that users look for our content and services. So there’ll be an ongoing amount of work to improve search, so that we can understand which approach works best to provide the performance and results we need.

Content transformation

This is the game changer. Bring on the technical side of content and search engine optimisation (SEO). This is about improving our content, joining it up and decoupling it from any templates and structures so we can use it in more versatile ways. The goal is a complete transition into arranging our content based on how users want to receive it.

It will mean seizing opportunities, creating new taxonomies and metadata, uncovering duplications, and getting better at understanding how we need to work on this internally so we can transform and maintain this for our users. This is a big piece of work and we will need to be realistic of what can be achieved with the time available.

Measurably build and improve common user journeys

This is the part where we are not only going to make improvements to common user journeys (such as admission journeys), but also measure the end-to-end journeys to see if we can create improvements over time.

This work will cover content, pattern, navigation changes and service design, creating a user experience that helps with task completion and also providing the experiential element and emotional connection users need.

Good products need good data

Better sharing and use of data across our systems can drive improved and targeted services for everyone. Improving analytics will also increase the efficiency of delivery and produce better outcomes.

We want to make considerable progress in how data are used to improve services. We know more can be done. Data integration and analysis will give us new insights into important and complex questions. We will work on it alongside iSolutions’ Information Management project.

Build a performance platform

Digital platforms will play an important role in our digital transformation. They will provide reusable, common services to accelerate digital adoption across the University.

We are working to build common platforms that make it easy for users to deal with our organisation. We are hoping that it will enable us to work together and deliver joined-up, consistent services for our users. This will also reduce the costs and risks to our university.

To help the University thrive in the digital age, we also need to learn from and partner with innovative companies from across the globe. Part of this work is to assess new infrastructure that will provide solid security as well as being nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changing needs of our users and meet their demands faster. It means working with new suppliers, introducing more competition and as a result we should be able to drive down costs.

Decommissioning

We know that over the coming years, new opportunities and risks will emerge. Our users and university’s needs will evolve and new technologies will make better services not only possible, but also expected.

This means that we need to continually engage with you to ensure digital services fit to what our users and you need. It also means that where possible, we will need to decommission services and retire content as well as platforms.

We need to archive or transition content on legacy university websites that no longer meet a user need. Some of our digital estate contains sites that were developed outside university restrictions and were originally granted exemption. Some sites contain functionality that we couldn’t previously accommodate, but this may change in the near future.

Our team will need to work with iSolutions, faculties and individuals to identify websites that can close and, where appropriate, transition content to our main domain or other appropriate websites.

This will help with the University’s wider objective of communicating to the world with authority and trust, while enjoying an easily manageable digital estate.

Foundation and governance: creating standards

Improvements to the website navigation, structure, language and design are always important. In order to elevate these metrics and make a difference we must have standards.

Part of this foundation work is to create best practice principles that our digital teams can use in the design and delivery of our university services, ensuring they are built from the ground up to be simple, clear and fast. Modern services mean using user-centred design. It means changes that will focus on improving functionality, accessibility and security.

Security and scalability

We’re taking security seriously and will be working alongside iSolutions’ cyber security workstream to identify any issues with platforms and technology, and address any security issues.
We are also looking to build tools and platforms that scale. Helping users to navigate through sequential lists of steps on our platforms, where completing an end-to-end service journey means interacting with a suite of related content and services.

This is important because it is essential to how the University would like to transform itself; in reality different departments, faculties and directorates join up in user journeys so that a user can access the information they need to effectively complete a transaction. It also means that, by collaborating and networking across hierarchies, we’re likely to remove the need for poorly performing existing services and formats.

Next steps

Voila! We will refresh and enrich it regularly – so expect more details soon.

You will also be able to keep track of our progress via a dashboard of performance metrics. We’ve already started to form teams around each of the missions/workstreams, but

You can check on our initial version in In the meantime, we will keep iterating – nothing is set in stone and we want you all to see the plan and feel excited about what’s to come.

Remember: our digital presence is a living thing that will continue to grow and evolve with us long after the OneWeb programme comes to a close.

As part of the OneWeb programme, we are also considering how we get more of YOU to be involved. So, with our news and show and tells. If you have any feedback, please get in touch.

There are more common service types than you’d imagine across an organisation as large as ours. We call these ‘design patterns’ and they enable us to create a consistent approach to how we design, build, test and recycle technical solutions effectively and efficiently. Things like applying for a programme, booking for events, finding a person, or a facility, and receiving notifications from us.

We are taking a whole-university approach to digital platforms so the common services which are delivered to people are more consistent and easier to use.

And in business terms – platforms offer savings, encourage collaboration and innovation, efficiency and responsiveness. But what they are really about is delivering a better experience for the people who use university services – an experience which is consistent, simple and makes it easy to get things done.

Still with me?

As our new undergraduate course pages are about to go live, our purpose is to create a new and improved product. But it is also an opportunity to do something clever – ‘the OneWeb way’.

What is the OneWeb way?

When we first started redeveloping a new product, we knew we had to practice what we preach: we need to follow our own best practice advice and guides, but also to live up to the vision of OneWeb which is centred around innovation and agility.

Part of this work was to assess new infrastructure that will provide solid security as well as be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changing needs of our users and meet their demands faster.��

What we have done

Undergraduate course pages are the meeting point for many different sources of data at the university. Some of this is descriptive content, some is driven by entry requirement, programme structure and other details.

Previously that would have been a case of manually building and entering information ‘by hand’ into web pages. But this was an opportunity to take a different approach. We combined the many data points of the University into a single consumable application programming interface (API) service via a series of microservices. We call this service  based on a many-headed serpent in Greek mythology.��

We also created “” – this is a new page delivery service that prioritises page render and delivery speeds.

An early system diagram, drawn in a meeting via the medium of MS Paint.

A more refined diagram of the microservice infrastructure used to create undergraduate course pages.

What does it mean? 

In plain English and away from our geeky terms (), microservices are a software development technique that allows high scalability. It means that demanding services can be deployed using smaller, more flexible, services in multiple servers to enhance performance while minimising the impact of other services. This is hard to achieve with a single, large monolithic service – such as a large single content management system (CMS) like SitePublisher.�� 

It also means that Paperboy allows us to deliver pages rapidly to a global audience (pages literally load quicker); allowing improved search engine rankings and more importantly, forging a better brand experience.

Focus on your services, not your servers

After much consideration, we also adopted a cloud platform to build, host and run OneWeb services. This infrastructure has been designed for scalable application deployment, and a DevOps platform for continuous integration and continuous deployment in line with agile methodology. We have also defined a defect management and release process designed by our quality assurance (QA) engineer via Atlassian JIRA Cloud to log, work upon, manage and report QA and release status.

What problem are we trying to solve?

As mentioned above, our processes, organisation, applications and infrastructure should be nimble enough to swiftly adapt to changing user needs and meet their demands faster.��

We also know that like many other complex organisations, our university has a significant problem with duplicate and erroneous data.

Our current web content management system (SitePublisher), although robust, is largely overburdened by surplus features and has become bloated. This bloat makes rapid development difficult and distracts from the simple need to deliver webpages at speed.

What can be done about it?

We can lift content-that-is-data (such as fees, or admission information) away from marketing information creating a single point of truth for information. Paperboy is a lightweight system that focuses on page delivery and nothing more. It means that it allows performance to be the “entire picture” and returning developer agility.

It also means that end-to-end applications are built-in months, rather than years. Because we need to move fast, we must deliver new business capabilities in days, not weeks. We must also provision and scale our system resources. That requires a big change to how we do things, both to build future-proof applications at scale, and to change our culture. We’ll do the latter by building an inclusive multi-disciplinary team based on function,  not department. This ties in beautifully with one of our principles – “fix? Not fight”.��

Why this is important

From a content point of view, separation and curation of data are essential to equalise the information we present as an institution. This separation also allows content writers to focus on marketing the courses without the need to collect, confirm and sanitise data that is held separately.

We must be at the forefront of delivering a user-centric, omnichannel digital experience where users can find open, precise and up-to-date information about our university, be inspired, engage and enrol. Inspired users become evangelists for our institution, giving us a clear advantage over our competition.

What else have we learned

Good data means good products!��

After probing the University’s data repositories, we learned that as an institution we need better ways to store and maintain the data we hold. The good news is that there is a separate project underway, which OneWeb will join up with, for data information.��

Less is more

Another important learning point for us all is not to be intimidated when replacing an extensive system like SitePublisher with a simple application that’s a few hundred lines of code – more often than not, less is more.

New approaches give us a competitive advantage

We also trying new technologies and methodologies to give the University a competitive advantage and be able to compete in a crowded market. But as we all know, change is messy, and delivery can be messier. So challenging the status quo, adapting to new ways of thinking and working, and doing it all quickly is no easy thing!��

What are the next steps

We will provide better, more sustainable data warehouses and interfaces all in collaboration with iSolutions. We will also be iterating and improving our data API service.��

We will improve, iterate and in some places replace parts of our page delivery system, Paperboy, to provide better longevity and adoption.

And we’ll continue to deliver products based on our roadmap and leverage the platform to increase user engagement by means of machine learning, artificial intelligence, cognitive services based on the needs of our users and testing.��

We are only scratching the surface of what technology can deliver for our University.

Thank you #1

I’d like to thank Jon Reader and Madhu Santhanam for their epic support when writing this article.

Thank you #2

Thanks go to all colleagues who worked hard and collaborated with us to help us move at speed so we can launch on time. Especially iSolutions folks!�� 

As we launch our first services, we will continue to undertake testing and research where we can, and respond to feedback on our site, making improvements to meet user needs and improve functionality.

 If you have any feedback, or would like more information on what we did, how or why – get in touch at J.D.Lineker@southampton.ac.uk.��

Imagine a world where our course (programme) pages are easy to understand and benchmark well against competitors and existing course pages.

Imagine a world where user needs are brought together with university policies, rules and goals, to create joined up experiences that help our users to do what they want to do instead of confuse them.

Okay, you get the gist – as the financial year draws to a close, so too does phase one of OneWeb. It has been short (we officially started in April), relentless and, it would be fair to say, not without its challenges. Nevertheless, we have delivered what we promised – in a very short space of time!

Thank you

Before I go any further a few thank yous are due to all who contributed to this phase. First and foremost: my team.

This team is tough and resilient – and they rose to every challenge along the way. The one consistent thing about change or transformation projects is that you’ll encounter issues and difficulties. This is perfectly natural, but can breed uncertainty. The challenge for us has been to maintain our focus on delivering genuine value and working through problems without getting bogged down. We kept going despite the inherent difficulties.

Thanks also to our stakeholders: the and members who have been looking at ways of helping us and navigating through many of the University’s processes and internal complexities.

And of course a very big thank you to all colleagues who worked very hard to help us meet short deadlines despite being very stretched themselves. We know it wasn’t easy, and we really appreciate it. Without you, our job would not have been possible!

Here’s a summary of what the last few weeks of delivery have been like.

OneWeb Financial Year 1

The main focus of this financial year was around the delivery of our university’s key product pages for the undergraduate (UG) journey. It wasn’t the only thing we addressed as part of the UG journey – many of you contributed to our understanding, either through workshops, interviews, design sprint, or the meetings that helped us with some of the nuances around the journey.

We also made time to deliver a couple of significant discoveries around Postgrad Taught (PGT) user journey and Research, with main focus on REF since it is a university strategic priority. So quite a lot in a short space of time.

For now, let me update you on the UG course pages and what are the plans prior to launch…

UG Course Pages: what are the problems we are trying to solve?

We wrote about issues with duplication, information architecture, governance, and compliance (e.g. CMA), but when we started a few months ago we had very conflicting pieces of information about how many programmes we actually offer and who is accountable for them. So the first thing we did was a comprehensive audit of the content we had, how it was distributed and how it was performing. This in itself was a valuable piece of work for the University.��

When designing solutions, we started with a real paired-back version of a course page, initially as basic wireframes for the content, which through several iterations, became a designed prototype that our developer used to build the page. By the end of April we had a minimum viable product (MVP) which was used to complete the first round of testing with prospective students. By this point, we already knew that the key facts tested well with users. We also found out further details that users would like to see on the existing UoS website and competitor sites.��

New key facts section

Since then, we’ve completed (pretty much every couple of weeks). We talked to users about structure, navigation and generally how they consume the content. More importantly, we observed how they searched for and used the content to complete the tasks they needed to do.

Our research tells us that people are often unsure about the information we (and competitors) provide when interacting with universities. This can result in people not applying for the right course, or applying to a course that they have no chance of getting on because the entry requirements or grades are not clear. In addition, because they do not understand all the terminology at that point, they’re also missing some vital information about the awards we offer, the location of the course, options and more.

What we’re doing about it

So, in creating a new design of the course pages, we are trying to remove all the barriers we may inadvertently put in place when users compare and find the courses they would like to apply for. For universities, managing complex legislation and associated compliance issues presents challenges when delivering digital services. It’s no stretch to say that our own internal processes are contributory to some of the usability issues we found, and as a result this has also led to inconsistencies in information. This is something this particular phase has highlighted in a significant way.

Our course page evolution April to June 2019

But let’s be clear, these problems are not unique to Southampton. Universities around the world are exploring how can they simplify admission information and compliance issues for users. And there is a real challenge tackling legislation, policy and rules in a consumable and accessible way for users.

Why this is important

As a result of only a few months’ hard work, we now have a digital product (aka course page) that users can navigate, scan and retrieve information from with ease. And it’s a well-tested product.

In total we completed over 25 hours of user testing with prospective students:

• All prospective students in testing commented on the clear and simple design and layout. Here’s Liam on the importance of simple and clean design.

• They like the Key Facts box which allows easy comparison with other courses.
• They found that the concise text and improved use of white space makes it easier to scan and retrieve the most relevant information.
• Left-hand menu is coherent and improves navigation.
• The design improves accessibility.

An example undergraduate course page

What else are we doing?

The scope for this phase was to complete all UG course pages. These will be launched in September. During the summer, we will be setting up some drop-in sessions for you to come and see the finished product. These will be informal and any of you are welcome to pay us a visit.

If you would like to , we will drop you a note when these take place.

But our work is not done. This is only the beginning of a very busy multi-year delivery.

Step one was to reduce content, simplify the design and improve usability – done. Step two is to interweave rich content (videos, pictures and much more) to encourage exploration of secondary user needs. This is where things get interesting and where we incorporate the learnings from our work on the . And any existing live pages will now be continuously curated to ensure they meet user needs.

What have we learned so far

Some of the key insights from our initial delivery phase include:

Taking a human and digital first approach

It’s not only important to focus on how we might make it easier for a machine to consume and crawl our information (e.g. Google search), but also how we might make it easier for humans to read and use our information. There is potential for us to do both.

Bridging the gap between content and coding

Instead of working in separate teams, we have found we work best when content designers, developers and user researchers come together as a multi-disciplinary team to test and design future approaches.

There is value in small bites

We know there is a lot of complexity in this space and because of this it is important to start small and iterate. We think there will be some key opportunities that are small in scope but could deliver significant value.

Parting words

There is a lot to do, however, we have already seen the value of bringing together people from diverse roles, skill sets and subject matter expertise.

In the next few weeks we will further define best practice principles and ways of working and we plan on giving you more opportunities to get in touch with us and be involved.

So to conclude, the last few months have been a taster of all there is to come.

• Did we think this was ever going to be simple? No.
• Did we work collectively and respectfully with colleagues to achieve it? Yes.
• Is there still room for improvement? Absolutely.

We can always do better, and this is exactly what we’re striving to do.

As always, we would love to hear from you. If you would like more information, or track progress, please get in touch.

*Spoiler alert* no one dies (not yet anyway )!

Chaos is a ladder

“Chaos isn’t a pit,” spake Littlefinger. “Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.” – Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish

Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish Source:

If we dig deeper into this quote, it entails self-survival and the power to seek and influence. It also talks about embracing unpredictability and where it can potentially take you.

OneWeb is about embracing change. Digital transformation is the act of radically changing how our university works, so it can survive and thrive in the digital era.

The thing is, change gets a bad rap. We fear what change can do to us, instead of thinking what we can do because of it. The acceleration of change, especially in digital programmes, often creates anxiety and stress, which is understandable. Not because it’s complicated, but because its primary function is of people, behaviours and relationships.

Sometimes you have to break stuff to improve it

As we previously mentioned, OneWeb is not about a shiny new website. The shiny website is merely a symptom of digital transformation – of us understanding and building a relationship with our users over time.

Daenerys ‘Breaker of Chains’ Targaryen starts with nothing. She has no land, no army, no power. Over time, she motivates her followers, builds relationships and amasses thousands of people to join her cause.

She is trying to create a better world by casting aside the trappings and traditions of the old one, and the ‘end users’ buy into this proposition.

OneWeb is an opportunity for advancement. Our official kick off was on 1 April, and what can I say? There are many moving pieces, many meetings, many events, and our user researchers are working hard to bring the insights we need in order for all of us around the University to learn fast, act, iterate and move on.

Now go fail again

A critical part of delivering the change and for making all this happen is an empowered agile multidisciplinary team. And we have these teams now. Every team member has their own unique strength. As an Agile team, we’re learning together, we’re appreciating change together and we’re working together.

From Content Designers to User Researchers, we’re collaborating to understand our users better and find the right solutions to problems.

Davos Seaworth knows that one can’t learn without trying and failing. When Jon Snow doubts his ability to lead and make an impact, the Onion Knight has this to say:

Source: HBO

Ser Davos understands that we won’t always succeed the first time we try, but what’s important is to have tried our best and to try again.

Our work is founded upon what our teams learn from research that involves real users, not on guesswork. We can’t be blinded by fear. Instead we can put these thoughts into work, evaluating the risks and acting to mitigate them where we can. Sometimes that means falling down, questioning everything, and then climbing back out of that cave to become a more well-rounded, self-aware person ready for a change.

“Don’t worry about fixing the world. You may or may not be the one to do it. But give a damn and try. Because what the world needs is people who give a damn and try.” – Ser Davos Seaworth

It seems like Davos holds himself by that.

We may not have crazy tyrants or evil ice king monsters to face down. But we’ve got plenty of to clean up. And we’ve got plenty of failures ahead of us.

So let’s clean up as much of the as we can. And if we fail, let’s go fail again.

On Wednesday 1 May Mark Wyatt and Ayala Gordon will be available for an AMA (Ask me anything) session about OneWeb.

You can . More detail to follow.��

Thanks for reading.

Credit: thank you and for helping me to translate my ideas into words.