Setting up relationships with project teams

• Critical friends should establish expectations of their role and mutual understanding of roles, reporting, degree of support and relationships with projects.
• Critical friends should demonstrate how they can contribute to the project development in a meaningful way.

Assisting project teams to achieve their outputs and outcomes

• Critical friends can help project teams ensure that they are on target for delivery of intended output and outcomes.
• Critical friends can support project teams in finding an appropriate balance between dealing with obstacles, meeting deadlines and reporting to stakeholders.
• Critical friends can support project teams in finding effective ways of re-establishing an achievable project plan if a substantial change of direction in the project occurs.

Supporting projects to effectively engage with the project steering group

Critical friends should: 

• Help projects to choose/profile steering group members.
• Help projects to formulate protocols for steering group meetings.
• Help the project to leverage senior management buy-in and engagement.
• Be prepared to ask ‘naive’ and challenging questions to the steering group.
• Attend steering group meetings only where you can add value. Try to combine this activity with a one-to-one meeting to maximise your contact with the project.

Helping project teams to communicate and engage stakeholders

• Project teams should be encouraged to develop a communications and stakeholder engagement strategy/plan rather than a dissemination strategy.
• JISC guidance on developing a communications and stakeholder engagement strategy/plan should be followed.
• The critical friend has a key role in stimulating effective, friendly and proactive interaction with communities of practice that may have emerged from or been linked to the project the critical friend is supporting.
• Critical friends should help projects to appreciate how Web2/multimedia can support project communications and stakeholder engagement.
• Support projects in identifying and sourcing technology resources e.g. from programme teams, open-source facilities, commercial offerings etc.
• Facilitate buy-in and adoption of technologies.
• Encourage a "practise what you preach" culture i.e. for projects and CAMEL cohorts to use the technologies.
• Projects should be encouraged to "practise what they preach" every day in terms of using Web2/multimedia technologies.

Helping projects to use all available support

Critical friends should help projects to: 

• Appreciate and use support from project sponsors, external expertise and project sponsor services/knowledge base.
• Better understand/contextualise the various project sponsor programme/project support activities.
• See how they can contribute to the success of the overall programme.
• Identify paths for future development.

Helping projects to share

Critical friends should:

• Help projects to understand the rationale for and benefits of contributing to, sharing and using resources that have been developed by others such as other projects.
• Emphasise to projects the need for and benefits of sharing assets, having open dialogue etc. and capturing process as well as outputs.

Supporting evaluation and base-lining activities.

Critical friends should: 

• Provide constructive feedback on drafts.
• Encourage and facilitate peer feedback from within CAMEL cohorts (and across cohorts) where applicable.
• Encourage peer review of draft Key reports. e.g. organise a CAMEL meeting where projects come prepared to offer peer critique of key reports. Facilitate this so that a consensus is reached and project managers get clear messages from the cluster.

Supporting the writing of reports

Critical friends should:

• Provide constructive feedback on draft reports.
• Encourage projects to follow guidance provided by JISC or other funders and point them to relevant resources where necessary.
• Encourage projects to share experiences whether unsuccessful/or successful. JISC fund risk; the whole point is to learn from our experiences and share them with the sector to reduce duplication, avoid pitfalls and become more efficient. 

Supporting the production of outputs

Critical friends should: 

• Encourage production of outputs that are usable and accessible by other stakeholders e.g.
• Case studies.
• “How-to” guidance.
• Support and training requirements.
• Likely implementation issues and how to overcome them.
• Risks and minimising risks.
• Costs/benefits.
• Required “readiness” of staff/students.
• Testimonials.
• Customisable resources e.g. templates.
• Demonstration, exemplars.
• Research evidence and evaluation reports.
• Papers and further information.
• Help projects to identify the unintended deliverables and/or outcomes and encourage them to write these up for others to learn from.