MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Teams
The other thing that we've introduced recently is a project
management culture into the union. And I think that that is
enormously beneficial because (a) it gives a focus for a task and
(b) very, very importantly it says that that's task will not just be
the responsibility of management -- it will be the responsibility of
whoever is on the project team. And I think that that builds and
bonds in a far greater way if people get the idea that they have
ownership; a belief that they are important and that they have a
role to play and that they are treated equally within the project. I
think that's a very useful way to take things forward and I think
that these things have all come about in recent years against a
background of the IIP culture and what we were looking for.
(Interviewee O)
This seems to have been an idea that originated during the merger
campaign:-
One of the things that we started talking about during the merger
was a different way of internal working, a project based way of
working, so we started to work in teams. And that did break the
church and state in terms of the region, the organisers’ role and
clerical staff role. So that was the kind of third leg of the
roadshows. And we put together for the first time teams at work
cross regional, or between institutions and regions, to become
the merger teams. And they were allowed more freedom to print
their own T-shirts, create their own dynamic around their own
patches and we also at that time did the first analysis of where
our members were in any meaningful terms………… Our
objective when we went into the merger was to try and get
people working together and working in teams, all this cross
boundary stuff. The pips that I have and the stripes that an
organiser had, not that. Just trying to make them work together
and share information. Impossible in a trade union, I know, but
we do try. So that was what we set out to do. And there was an
overwhelmingly successful campaign for the merger. I think with
hindsight some of the things that we tried to put in place in terms
of the project way of working, some of the structures that we
thought might come out the other side in terms of strategic
thinking were probably a bit too ambitious in some ways
because in hindsight they were never going to last effectively
through the merger. (Interviewee G)
The union organised staff conferences in Daventry in 2000 and 2001
and it was here that strategic project teams were formed and to which
they reported back:-
We've gone through a series of projects from a big conference
we've had in Daventry. From that we then formed up all our staff
into project groups and gave them things to do. Some of them
have come to a conclusion and this is basically a summary.
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