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My Warwick Life: Richard Hale


Richard HaleThe My Warwick Life feature gives an insight into staff and students’ lives at Warwick, considering both their work and social life on campus. This week we hear from Richard Hale, IT Manager, IGGY.

There’s no such thing as a typical day, but, in a nutshell, my job involves…

coordinating all of the technical partners and myriad of online services for IGGY's relaunched online social and learning network, IGGY.net, as well as supporting the internal IT activities of the growing IGGY team. This means I read and write an insane amount of emails everyday. I also need to understand the issues that the rest of the IGGY are currently experiencing and put in place fixes or sometimes give training and support. I also make a mean cup of tea!

I had a really useful meeting recently with…

Fish in a Bottle, who are our primary technical development partner. They have offices in Leamington and despite the use of email, Skype, Google Docs etc, we still benefit greatly from getting around a table together to discuss our very tight development schedule.

It would be really useful to work more closely with…

the members of our site. We support gifted young people around the world, aged 13-18. So far I haven't had the opportunity to meet any of them in person, but I come from an education background and always valued direct interactions with students. No matter how well you think you know them, you never really do until you speak to them directly.

I recently attend a new staff induction meeting...

which was led by Ken Sloan. It was more useful than I thought it was going to be frankly. It really cemented in my mind what a good move it was to take a position at Warwick and how much opportunity I have.

I’m really enjoying working on…

our "Phase 2" launch of IGGY.net. It's such an exciting time to be working at IGGY and we have an aggressive development timeline which is keeping us all on our toes. Creating a site from from scratch that can compete with what young people are used to using online, Facebook, Twitter etc is not easy... but we are getting there and the site looks amazing.

I recently learnt that…

Salesforce makes the world go round. I've learnt about 2% of what Salesforce can do and we really do need to leverage it fully as a team and as an online service in order to meet and exceed our members expectations.

Warwick’s unique because…

it attracts bright students and excellent staff. Everyone in the team is truly committed to their role, to the team and to making IGGY a success. It's a great feeling to work in an exciting and dynamic environment. It's sometimes tense, sometimes stressful but if you're working on something you believe in it's all worthwhile.

The best thing about working at Warwick is…

coffee. So many places to get a fix... flapjacks optional (but frequently purchased).

If I could change one thing at the University, it would be…

the established processes that slow our activities down sometimes. Everyone, in every department is focused on not making any mistakes... it can get frustrating how long some things take.

I recently had a meal at...

Varsity. Wow it was busy now that students are back on campus!

I usually travel to campus by...

Car. I live about an hour away, but I do car share with my partner who also works at the University plus another member of the IGGY team who lives nearby.

I’m really glad I'm able to...

watch our content team put together our amazing material for the members of IGGY.net. Every time I look up from my desk their screens always have crazy looking graphics and video on them. The whole IGGY team is open to working with each other and taking tips and advice from our individual expertise. That means that even the IT Manager can contribute to the content team and the content team can give me advice on what they want and need from me to help them.

I’m looking forward to using my Warwick Learning Account vouchers for…

the "Work Psychology" course I'm booked onto next week. Long term I'd like to get an MBA!


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