UNE has a comprehensive PPDR process already in place for individuals to plan their career goals and personal development. However, since the individual process is necessarily confidential, it can be difficult to understand how individual plans and goals fit into the context of a wider team and university working together towards shared goals. DigEd identified this as a priority to address, based on our portfolio’s goals of open communication and transparency, trust and team-based ways of working. To this end, we designed an augmented PPDR process for our teams for 2022.
Our augmented process builds in a collaborative scaffolding layer that complements the individual process, to contextualise individual goals and work in the broader team direction and support effective translation of goals into action. The process adds two key events to the individual process that develop a set of collaborative resources to support ongoing conversations throughout the year. We’ll be following the same process for 2023, drawing on evaluation feedback to refine the design of the events.
If you’re interested in learning more about our process, read on for a quick overview, or you can download a PDF infographic of the full process below.
Event 1: PPDR Week
PPDR week is a workshop event plus asynchronous activities that bring the whole portfolio together in December each year. We take time to reflect on the previous year, celebrating achievements, identifying challenges and evaluating our practice and processes. We then turn our attention to the next year and beginning to plan our goals – doing this in a shared space where we can learn from others, identify synergies and identify collective goals to work towards. These goals are then mapped to the university’s strategic goals, our portfolio goals and our operational workstreams to create a really clear sense of how individual goals and tasks connect to the bigger picture.This generates some great conversations and sparks new ideas, and there’s usually a healthy dose of jokes and memes too (some much needed light relief at a very intense time of year…!).
This event lays the foundations for our individual PPDR planning the following year – we can reference back to what we captured during this week when we are completing our own PPDRs.
Event 2: Plan into Action workshop
After individual PPDRs have been completed, we hold a Community of Practice workshop where we collectively work through the process of translating high-level goals into concrete actions. We’ve found this is really valuable for connecting PPDRs in practice – it can sometimes be difficult to see how long term goals can be progressed in the short term, and how our day to day work connects to our long term goals. The Plan into Action workshop bridges this gap, and working collaboratively allows us to learn from each other and plan as a team instead of a collection of individuals.
Want to know more? Download the infographic:
