22 August 2025 - SSG25 Hassan Ghani
My First UCISA SSG: Through My Eyes
I’m Hassan Ghani, Head of Operations at Buckinghamshire New University. I’m 5’6, rectangular glasses, have a ducktail beard and, as I sit down to try and figure out how to write about my 1st UCISA experience at SSG 25, I find myself googling colour charts so I can tell you I’m in a “fern green” t-shirt and “dutch white” cargo pants. Does that make this more inclusive and accessible? Probably better suited to a video or in-person appearance but it was encouraged at SSG. Is it different? Most certainly, but that was a recurring theme for me.This was my very first UCISA event. Different. It was a "Beatles themed" conference by the Mersey attended by a Manchester United fan who doesn’t even have a favourite Beatles song. Different.
Day one kicked off with the Newcomers’ Session where I found out that there is such a thing as an Anzac biscuit (definitely different, for me). Aside from dodging the cake vs. biscuit debate there was a small challenge put to us: “What do you want to get out of this?”
The answers were refreshingly straightforward (because they gave them to us): participate, network, contribute. That was it. Nobody was here to sit quietly at the back, not even if someone was addicted to Rich Tea biscuits. Everyone was here to talk, share and swap different war stories and ideas. But… does that make us different… or the same?
One of the first sessions that really stuck with me was called "Knowledge on Tap" (Adrian Moore & Emma Lutkin): how do we move from a swamp of unorganised information to a crystal-clear reservoir we can all draw from?
That hit home. In IT Ops, you know how much time is wasted chasing information buried in tickets, old emails or just in someone’s head. As we push through our Windows 11 rollout and Intune deployment at BNU, I couldn’t help to think. "If our knowledge doesn’t evolve alongside our tech, we’ll just recreate the same old problems in shinier systems." So, different, but ultimately the same.
Adrian and Emma showed how their knowledge base integrates directly with tickets and even experiments with AI connectors. Some of it worked, some didn’t but that honesty made it more useful. Turning to my brother, who was there with me (looks the same but supports Arsenal - very different), we both gave each other a knowing look. At BNU we're also evolving the service desk’s role to not just close tickets but to own student-facing knowledge. What else can we do? What if we placed technicians in the Student Hub (a different department with the same remit to assist students) once a month, maybe as advisers first, problem-fixers second? The session left me with more questions than answers, but in the best way.
Then there was Enterprise Service Management with Mark Temple and Iain McCracken. Their message: ESM isn’t about tools, it’s about mindset. Universities can’t afford siloed services anymore.
They painted a picture of what happens when support functions (IT, HR, estates, even academic services) stop thinking of themselves as separate shops and start acting like part of the same backbone. Another note on the iPad about how I'd thought about this already too. Our Service Desk is an IT shop window but what if, in time, it could be part of something bigger? A single doorway into services across the university?
Liz McNaughton and Anand Elangovan then talked about "Redesigning Frontline IT". Oh yes, thinking the same but show me something different please. The way they described it, fragmented and manual service management quietly eats away at everything: efficiency, security, even the student experience.
Their advice was blunt: don’t chase quick wins. Go after the big pain points, the ones that cause friction every single day. It’s tempting to chase easy improvements but the real transformation comes from solving the awkward, messy, high-volume problems, the ones nobody wants to tackle. Looking around the room and speaking to people in the queue ahead of me for the food (mmm, cookies), these people have got the same but different problems…
University of Aberdeen, you're up next! Oh, you want to share your automation journey in a session called "Why Wait: Automate"?. Don't automate for its own sake you say? Be practical, you say? To shreds, you say? (They didn’t say that but I couldn't resist a Futurama joke.)
I loved how practical it was. They were tying it to real, lived experiences. We can do that BNU too then! Ok, let me think, we what is "more of the same" that we will always need to do but do differently? Better? More inclusively? New staff inductions: why not let people choose between a video, an in-person session or a remote option? Let's finally auto-assign software to role profiles instead of having endless manual approvals and installs. They built in “are we sure?” checkpoints, so you get the benefit of automation but without the risk of pressing the wrong button and sending chaos rippling through the system.
One of the most thought-provoking sessions was from Owen Dickenson and Howard Hall on Modernising the Operating Model. The message: stop waiting for things to break. Move from reactive to predictive. They showed how analytics can tell you when a device is about to fail, so you can fix it before the user even notices. Less downtime, happier people, lower costs, even a smaller carbon footprint.
It was a clear reminder that the "old as time" objective of operational stability is as strategic as shiny new projects handling transformation. At BNU, where we’re forever being asked to do more and more, the idea of building in predictive maintenance made complete sense.
And then there was Service Experience Management. Paula Kirby and Casey Tolaini asked a killer question: if someone has to log a ticket, hasn’t the service already failed? Well, that's different. We love to wave around SLA stats but what do they actually tell us about experience? At UCL, password resets looked “all green” on paper (98% resolved in SLA; at BNU we’re at 99.7%, not bragging, honest) but in reality they were the single biggest source of tickets and frustration.
It made me think: at BNU, how do we measure the feeling of our services, not just the metrics? Maybe every service needs its own “experience vision” — not just a dashboard.
Two days flew by. From biscuits to automation, from swamps of knowledge to Beatles by the Mersey, my first UCISA event was nothing like I expected. It wasn’t about tools or buzzwords, it was about people sharing, questioning, and challenging each other about the same problems we've seen across the sector and how we can differently resolve them, be better.
If you’re heading to SSG for the first time, my advice is simple: go to the sessions that don’t look “for you.” That’s where the surprises are. Talk to people, some of the best chats were over coffee and cakes.
I left Liverpool with my head buzzing: ideas for how to reshape knowledge management, how to rethink our service desk, how to measure experience and how to approach automation with purpose. More than anything, though, I left with a sense of community: the same kind of people, my people.
And if I had to wrap it all up in one line? Let’s just say that "with a little help from my UCISA friends" (had to be ONE Beatles reference), I found clarity; energy; ideas; but ultimately it's all the same, but different, which means that we can have lots of different ideas and solutions for the same goal to better support our respective users.
