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SIG-MSP: working together to deliver a compelling value proposition for NRENs

The latest meeting of the Special Interest Group on Management of Service Portfolios (SIG-MSP) took place at Jisc’s central London offices on 17-18 January 2018. SIG-MSP promotes collaboration on the topics of strategic, business and cooperative management of services.

The meeting focused on two major topic areas: learning and development and the NRENs’ value proposition.

Paul Feldman, Jisc’s CEO (UK), kicked off the two-day meeting by illustrating the British NREN’s focus, services and vision for the UK. Irina Mikhailava, Head of Learning and Development for GÉANT, followed with an introduction of GÉANT Learning and Development (GLAD) function and explained how this department aims to provide value to the community by enabling excellence through knowledge transfer.

GARR (Italy) and Jisc (UK) gave informative lightning talks on their learning and development programmes and platforms, whilst AMRES (Serbia) presented the Campus Best Practice Academy and its potential new direction to turn the most relevant existing best practice documents into electronic training materials.

On day two, we heard from four NRENs on their value proposition, specifically how they present themselves to potential or current users to demonstrate the value they bring; it was great to see that there was a common set of themes across all presentations. NRENs shared experiences on how to make a compelling value proposition, received detailed feedback and discussed the resources required from GÉANT to be able to better support NRENs to explain more clearly their value proposition to their audiences.

Next steps
The learning and development teams will aim to organise a training-focused workshop at TNC18 and evaluate the possible creation of a specific Special Interest Group or Task Force. GÉANT will produce and distribute to NRENs a slide deck comprising selected elements from the NRENs’ value proposition presentations to use when meeting their membership base and funders.

The discussions highlighted areas of common interest and identified topics for the next SIG-MSP meeting that will take place on 17 April 2018 in Split, Croatia, to be hosted by CARNet (Croatia). Agenda items will include cloud adoption, partner service portal and NREN support to governmental users. Registration is open.

Hope to see you there!

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