It may sound like something for Kermit the frog, but no, I am talking about ‘Relationship Management’ and how the work here in the UK has been picked up in the USA.

I recently starting working on the JISC Relationship Management programme, which is genuinely a really interesting look at how institutions deal with the people they interact with. Relationship management is becoming increasingly important in the tertiary education sector as institutions try to meet the challenges of funding cuts and increased student and community expectations. Employers and other external customers may have the potential to help the sector navigate through these difficult times, however good customer relationship management is necessary to maintain and develop such relationships.

Sharon Perry, my colleague also working on CETIS support of the JISC programme, was in touch with Elliot Felix of BrightSpot in New York about service design in HE. His focus is more on using service design to design/improve educational spaces, however he has written a briefing paper on 7 things You Should Know About Service Design and mentions Derby’s work which they did as part of the programme.

They got together through Twitter, which is how he picked up the Service Design in HE Briefing Paper that the University of Derby produced for CETIS as well as their project work. He’s just in the process of writing a paper for the Journal of Learning Spaces and also mentions Derby’s work there.

He was interested in the design of learning spaces (he’s aware of JISC projects in this area) and also the Relationship Management Programme as a whole, and Sharon gave him further info, for example the link to the SLRM case studies on the JISC website. It is really promising to hear that the work here is of relevance and interest in other countries and it will be interesting to explore such links further and see what we can learn from across the pond also.