The challenge

King’s College London is a world-class university and research-based institute in London. It is currently ranked as the seventh best university in the country.  

As a London based university, King’s College London have a lot of premium central London property. This requires innovation in the use and management of these spaces. To do this, the effective collaboration of the Estates and Facilities and the IT departments is essential.

Both departments recognised that there are dependencies across the teams that could be better understood and managed.  

The university invited 4OC to bring the two departments together and to help them to improve the way that they worked together.

Getting two departments to recognise the value of each other's work

The response

We used our experience of team development and the facilitation of sensitive discussions to work with the Estates and Facilities and IT teams across a series of workshops to help establish clear methods of working better together, which also aligned to the university’s wider V2029 mission. 

This included developing a set of principles which were then used on a ‘live’ project to develop a high-level plan of activities to ensure the timely but innovative and collaborative development of an Enhanced Learning Centre in the Macadam Centre.  

The outcome

The main purpose of the project was about collaborating effectively to develop an Enhanced Learning Centre. However, this project helped broker a better understanding between the IT and Estates and Facilities teams; both about each other and their roles. With this as a strong foundation, we built a number of solutions about how to practically work better together.

This is the most significant outcome as it extends beyond Enhanced Learning Centre. The impact is ongoing.