Building bridges: enhancing collaboration between staff in IT and learning related roles in further education

Themes

There is no magic bullet for creating the right conditions for effective co-working. We found a complex picture of overlapping causes and effects. To help people to explore the issue in their own organisations, we’ve gathered the main constituent elements into a set of themes. These themes are a way of breaking down both where problems may arise and where to target your solutions.

It’s important to realise that the way tensions appear may not be the root cause. For example, something that looks like a personality clash or poor communication could in fact be driven by resourcing issues, and addressing these may offer a more effective long-term solution.

For each of these themes we’ve included a description and a set of questions that you can use to interrogate your own practice. We’ve also included some illustrative examples. We compiled these imagined scenarios based on examples given to us anonymously by individuals and focus groups. These may offer some inspiration and we strongly recommend adapting any approach to suit your specific situation and personnel.

Shared vision and purpose

Leaders that want to foster an organisational culture of collaboration and successful co-working need to create the right conditions for that to work. It can take extra energy for people to work together if structures and strategies are designed in ways that work against collaboration. Look at how your vision, strategies and espoused values affect culture and behaviour.

A focus on agreed outcomes rather than roles gives people something to work towards together. A role focus risks making the priority a narrow set of objectives for that individual or function. An outcome focus looks at a more fundamental purpose that can unite the different roles involved.

Imagined scenario: working on the big picture together

In one successful college, strategic planning of teaching and learning is worked out at the highest level, involving senior representation from all the different functions and services as equal partners. The strategy has a clear set of messages and principles and these form the basis of all interdepartmental cooperation. Where there is tension between operational aims, strategic leads are able to step back and question how they can best reach a solution that moves them towards fulfilling the strategic aims.

Questions to ask

• How are staff all areas involved in shaping the college’s digital direction, rather than one group being asked to deliver a vision defined by the other?
• Do IT and teaching and learning teams share a clearly articulated vision for how digital technology supports curriculum quality, inclusion, and learner outcomes—and how is this vision consistently communicated and reinforced?
• To what extent are teaching and learning priorities reflected in digital and IT strategies, procurement decisions, and roadmaps?
• How does your senior leadership model shared ownership of digital teaching and learning, rather than positioning it solely as an IT or pedagogy issue?

Resources and working environment

There are practical considerations to bear in mind to achieve successful collaboration and cooperation, such as with cross team “task and finish” groups. Even if your vision, strategy and values are properly aligned for this, there may still be barriers in people’s working environments that make it difficult.

Think of it as clearing the debris and straightening the roads to make things easier for people.

Imagined scenario: responsiveness to needs

Faced with the need to renew key pieces of digital equipment such as teachers’ laptops, a new IT manager takes the opportunity to work closely with teaching staff to identify non -standard equipment needed to meet current requirements and likely future needs. Using this information and partnering with the vice principal for teaching and learning, she successfully lobbies for additional funding for higher spec devices. This reduces the maintenance burden on the IT team, allowing them to deliver a much more responsive service. It also reduces costs for the organisation in the longer term, as IT staff are able to focus their time on a broader range of priorities.

Questions to ask

• Are time and workload explicitly allocated for IT staff and teaching staff to collaborate on curriculum design, system improvement, and innovation?
• Do physical and digital working environments support collaboration, for example through shared planning spaces, joint pilots, or accessible testing environments?
• How well do resourcing decisions balance innovation with a secure and robust infrastructure, allowing colleges to maintain reliable services while trialling new approaches to teaching and learning?
• Are teaching staff given adequate support and training to use digital systems effectively, reducing reliance on reactive IT support?
• How transparent are decisions about constraints (budget, staffing, infrastructure), and do both groups understand the trade-offs involved?

Motivation and mindset

It’s often assumed that a lack of cooperation is down to a lack of willingness. We hear about “silo mentality” a lot. A note of caution: this is usually where problems about cooperation and collaboration appear but it is always worth considering what factors have led to problems with motivation. Could it be to do with the previous two themes, shared vision and resources?

Imagined scenario: reward and recognition

Keen to foster a creative mindset among teaching staff and develop the creative use of technology, the head of quality at one college partners with the head of IT to instigate a termly award programme. This is aimed at small projects that demonstrate creative thought and demonstrable impact on the student experience. The best examples are showcased across the college to inspire others. One of the key criteria is that all projects have to include an active partner on the IT team.

Questions to ask

• What assumptions do IT and teaching staff hold about each other’s roles, pressures, and expertise, and how actively are these challenged?
• How does leadership recognise and reward collaborative behaviour, rather than only individual or departmental outcomes?
• Do staff feel psychologically safe to experiment, give feedback, and admit uncertainty when working across professional boundaries?
• How are failures or setbacks framed—as learning opportunities shared across teams, or as problems attributed to one side?
• To what extent is collaboration positioned as ‘core business’, rather than as an optional or additional activity?
• Where collaboration works well, what common goals are visible, and how can these be made explicit and replicated across the organisation?

People and role

You probably know people in your organisation who are natural collaborators. Maybe you’re one of them! While some people have an aptitude and a willingness to work like this naturally, there are still steps any organisation can take to support their people to be successful collaborators.

Imagined scenario: watercooler power

Sometimes the “right people in the right room” point can be taken literally. One college works to break up departmental silos by bringing together the leadership of IT services, teaching quality and learning technology into the same open plan office space. Their teams are still nearby, but the leaders find that the proximity and visibility of their key colleagues make informal conversations much easier. Co-location builds understanding, makes some problems quicker to solve and encourages creative thinking. See the section below on “glue work” for another angle on this.

Questions to ask

• Are roles and responsibilities between IT teams and teaching staff clearly defined, particularly around learning platforms, digital pedagogies, and support?
• Do hybrid or boundary‑spanning roles exist (eg learning technologists, digital curriculum leads), and are they empowered and valued?
• How are staff selected and developed for collaborative roles, including skills in facilitation, translation, and relationship‑building?
• Where decisions are shared, is authority also shared, or do accountability structures unintentionally reinforce silos?
• How does the organisation support continuity, so relationships and shared understanding are not lost through turnover or restructuring?

Communication

Co-working stands and falls on the relationships and the flow of information between the different parties.

Imagined scenario: only connect

After achieving ISO27001 certification, the IT manager identifies an increase in dissatisfaction with her team’s service. She works out that a lot of this is down to the IT team being perceived as a “blocker” that says no to the majority of requests for new types of software from teaching staff. Through attending department meetings and day-to-day interactions, she and her team explain the risks of cyber-attacks and data loss to teaching staff and their students, using real life examples of other organisations. They also create guidance for teaching staff to help them assess potential data risks from online tools that they might consider using. These meetings become standing arrangements to facilitate better ongoing collaboration and information sharing.

Questions to ask

• How can we help people to come together more and meet each other as people outside of difficult situations?
• How regularly and purposefully do IT and teaching teams communicate, beyond issue resolution (eg service outages or change requests)?
• Are communication channels and language accessible and meaningful to both groups, avoiding unnecessary technical or pedagogical jargon?
• How is feedback from teachers, IT staff and learners gathered, prioritised, and acted upon, and is the impact of that feedback made visible?
• Do IT teams have early visibility of curriculum and assessment changes, and do teaching staff understand forthcoming system or security changes?
• How does leadership ensure communication is two‑way, enabling dialogue rather than dissemination?

Understanding hybrid and bridging roles

An essential aspect of successful transformation work and day-to-day operations is to acknowledge and support people who are in roles that naturally enable them to bridge different parts of the organisation. These may not be senior positions or carry much formal authority, but these people are naturally well-placed to bring people together, facilitate sharing of practice and information, and they are often highly motivated.

Software engineer and author Tanya Reilly describes this essential activity as “glue work”; often non-technical and based on the ability to form relationships. For instance, a learning technologist, regardless of where they sit in the organisation, can act as a sort of interpreter between IT and teachers based on their understanding of both those areas of expertise.

Library and learning resource centre staff are also in a position to provide a lot of this “glue work”. Participants at community events have identified these sorts of examples:

• Signposting, problem-solving and interpreting information needs
• Acting as an intermediary between IT, learners and staff
• Communicating hidden student challenges back to teachers
• Providing subject-focussed guides to resources both digital and print

Challenges faced by hybrid roles

As “glue work” can appear as quite non-specialised, its value and the skills required are often overlooked. People providing this function can be disregarded or find they encounter institutional barriers due to a lack of formal authority. Often the work goes unacknowledged as it’s about fostering relationships through micro-interactions and not so much about tangible results that form key performance indicators (KPIs).

Where personal motivation is high, many people performing these roles do so outside their normal duties. This can lead to stress and burn out. Approachable people sometimes find it hard to say no.

It takes insightful leadership to identify people and roles that provide this essential “glue work” in an organisation.

Actions to support

• As a leader, identify and celebrate work that demonstrates this ability to bring people together collaboratively, especially when not routinely recognised
• Where appropriate, think how you could recognise the work through formal structures like performance review, reward and recognition
• Donate your influence to people in these hybrid and bridging roles when they encounter organisational barriers
• Lis Parcell describes “glue work” as "a quiet act of leadership". Explore how you could develop these natural leaders to take greater responsibility and influence

Further insights on supporting people in bridging roles can be found in this post by Glyn Rogers.

Practical activities

When groups come together to collaborate, or where you want to build empathy and understanding between people, it can be helpful to use facilitated activities to establish common ground.

The aim of the activities outlined below is to provide a space for relationship building within a multi-disciplinary team where you feel like there may be a lack of mutual understanding. They will work best at an early point where the group is establishing itself.

• Bear in mind that activities that bring groups together where there may be existing tensions or a history of problems needs to be handled sensitively.
• Establish ground rules that emphasise listening and mutual respect. A skilled facilitator can be invaluable here.
• It can be useful to create a “pinboard” or “car park” for valid issues that need to be escalated or just put it on the back burner to enable you to achieve the goals you have before you that day.

Activity 1: A day in the life

A storytelling activity can often provide people with an insight into day to day realities for other people.

Break into small groups of two or three where people represent a variety of roles. Working in smaller groups helps people feel less vulnerable.

Give them a prompt such as:

• Dealing with the unexpected
• Learning an important lesson
• Making a difference
• A moment that changed how I saw the world

Focus on things that have happened in a work context. Allow a few minutes for people to think in silence or make a few notes.

Go round each person in the group. They should all use the same prompt if possible.

They should start off with the phrase “I remember this time when…” They have two minutes to tell the story without interruption.

After the story is finished, the other person/people in the group can ask questions.

Move on to the next person and so on until everyone has had a turn.

To finish, each person should share with the wider group what it was they learned that they didn’t know before hearing the other stories. Asking a playful “so what?” question can be powerful here: what will we do to take advantage of this new learning? Otherwise the activity might be seen as time-filler exercise without a purpose.

If there are any actions to be taken, make sure it is clear who will take responsibility for them and set a time for their implementation.

Activity 2: What matters most

This activity aims to help colleagues understand the priorities of other teams and individuals and to challenge assumptions. It’s intended to work in a situation where you have representatives from different groups. It’s important in this activity to focus on roles and not individuals.

Stage one

Working individually or in small groups where people broadly share the same role focus, offer a shared disruptive scenario that might affect the roles of all the people present. For example:

• Rolling power cuts due to industrial action
• Ransomware attack on the organisation during assessment season
• Arrival of a new principal/CEO
• Ofsted inspection
• Immediate, three-day college closure due to weather emergency

Provide a worksheet with blank columns labelled for different roles in the organisation, including their own and for the other groups in the room, such as:

• Teaching staff
• IT support staff
• Library/learning resource centre staff
• Estates
• Data services

Start by thinking of your own situation. What priorities and drivers will determine what action you take in order to deal with the scenario and achieve the best outcome? You don’t need to say what you will actually do.

Now look at the other columns. Imagine being in their shoes. As much as you can, write down what priorities and drivers they will be writing about for the same scenario.

Stage two

Mix the groups up so that people are now working with others outside of their own function. For each of the roles on the worksheet, compare and contrast the priorities that have been written down, the ones for your own area and the imagined ones that you suggested.

Encourage storytelling where people talk about occasions where a similar scenario happened. What do you notice?

• Is there broadly good understanding of what motivates other teams?
• What things surprised you about the differences?
• What new things have you learned about the other teams?
• What actions could you take as an organisation to help form a better understanding of what happens in other teams?

To finish, hold a final plenary to collect the main insights that were identified. Like the first activity, ask the question “so what?”; what will or can change on the basis of what we’ve learned? If there are any actions to be taken, make sure it is clear who will take responsibility for them and set a time for their implementation.

Totally resolving tension?

It’s worth noting that the aim here is not to totally get rid of organisational tension! Diversity of perspectives, cultures and insights can be a real strength in any organisation. The key thing is to make sure that these are effectively balanced and that you avoid situations where one set of practices and objectives overrides others to the extent that core goals are missed and wellbeing and relationships are damaged.

We titled this guide “Building bridges” for a reason. The reason bridges (or any other structure, for that matter) remain standing is due to the tensions inside them. If the tensions are imbalanced, the bridge falls. With no tension at all, the bridge remains a pile of materials and serves no purpose!

When all the elements are performing their different functions but working towards the core shared outcome, the structure is strong and resilient.

Further resources

• Nesta collective intelligence design playbook (pdf)
• Untools – tools for better thinking
• Sessionlab – library of facilitation techniques

Further support from Jisc

Vision for change workshop - facilitated collaborative workshops to improve your strategic planning

If you would like assistance in facilitating effective collaboration in your organisation, contact your Jisc relationship manager.