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The Clientside Podcast

Making uni life digitally unique, with Jasper Hegarty-Ditton

The Clientside Podcast

32 min Jasper Hegarty-DItton

Andrew chats to Jasper Hegarty-Ditton, head of digital and data at Leeds University Union, about digital transformation, sustainability, student summer balls and catering for the digital consumers of the future.

Connect with Jasper on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ja...

Read the full transcript and access the show notes at https://adigital.agency/podcast.

Follow Andrew on Twitter at https://twitter.com/aarmitage or connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewarmitage.

Find out more about A Digital at https://adigital.agency

Get a free copy of Andrew's book, Holistic Website Planning at https://gothedistance.website.

Listen on your smart device or read the transcript below

The tough part of my job is that we have the consumers of the future. So a student coming to university at age 18, for example, they live their life on Netflix, on TikTok, on platforms that have really well-designed algorithms that learn about their behaviour, learn what they want, and then feed it to them in a 'Here's what you want' way, but also with the discovery layer on top – and they bring all those expectations to us. And so my job is to say, ‘Right, well, how can we come close to meeting those expectations? Or even if we can't come close, how can we work towards meeting those expectations in interface, in service, interaction and also in look and feel?’

Jasper Hegarty-DItton Tweet

Podcast Transcript

Andrew: Hello. You're listening to The Clientside Podcast. My name is Andrew Armitage and it's good to be back with another episode. I've been talking to digital leaders about their experience from a range of organisations. This is our 49th episode. We're edging closer to that 500, which is only a couple of weeks away now. The podcast is supported by the digital agency I founded called A Digital. You can find more details about us along with the full back catalogue of previous episodes on our website. Head over to adigital.agency/podcast to find those.

Andrew: We'll also find transcripts for all of our episodes, along with links and notes from each show. So today's guest is a seasoned digital executive leader and strategist. Jasper Hegarty-Ditton is the Director of Digital and Data at Leeds University Student Union, where he's been overseeing a variety of digital transformation activities in many ways accelerated by the pandemic to create a fantastic student experience for those across the campus at Leeds University.

Andrew: In the past, Jasper has been many things in his career, from a programmer to digital director, gaining a unique ability to apply his experience and insight to create innovative responses to all types of digital challenges. His specialities include data governance, business strategy, overseeing cloud migrations and deployments, using Software as a Service platforms. And he's passionate about developing his team around him, encouraging ongoing learning opportunities. So welcome to The Clientside Podcast, Jasper, thank you for joining me.

Jasper: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Andrew: So we'll kick off: just give yourself a little bit of an introduction to our listeners. Tell them who you are, what you do, and who you work for.

Jasper: Sure. So Leeds University Union is one of the largest student unions in the UK. Leeds University has roughly speaking about 40,000 students and as a union we perform a huge range of services for those students. And I think from the sort of typical experiences that you might expect – bars, nightclubs, evening events through to supporting students with their academic life, their academic studies, acting as a support when they're struggling or we need to do more to make them really love their time at Leeds.

Jasper: And so from a digital and data perspective, that's a huge range of things, everything from EPOS management EPOS systems in the retail outlets that we manage through to platforms that help students apply for jobs. We have a temporary employment agency. So it's a huge range of fixed infrastructure wire devices in our building on campus through to SaaS platforms that help us digitally transform the way that we help students.

Andrew: Yeah, fantastic. I remember fondly my days of time in the students union when I was back at the University of Central Lancashire back in the day. So, yeah, I've got a good understanding of the type of things that student union offers. Just give us a little bit of context around the number of students and the number of people on your team or more specifically, the staff within the union.

Jasper: So the union has a core of about 150, what we describe as career staff, so permanent members of staff. However, one of the things that we do as a union is provide opportunities for students. So that's matched by a varying number of a couple of hundred students on top of that who work in our outlets, work in our teams throughout the organisation. And that really allows us to provide opportunities for students, help them develop in their expertise prior to going off for their careers, and also gives us an opportunity to draw new talent into our organisation.

Jasper: So to give you an example, I oversee our digital services structure, which is a structure I created when I arrived, looking at how we could do things better. One of the newer areas of that structure is a data team that I'm forming later in the year, and the person who's going to work with me on setting that function up is soon to graduate data science master's student. So bringing some of that expertise, her experiences or her studies, but also her prior work. So that gives you an idea of how we as an organisation operate. We certainly employ people who are experienced, mid-career, senior in their career, but also we're looking to see how we can provide opportunities for students and realistically how we can continue to be aspirational whilst on a charity budget.

Andrew: Yeah. Sounds good. Combining a bit of theory with the real-world experience and it's tough. I think getting started in digital, there's so many different routes that people could take and having that opportunity to have hands on experience with projects obviously sets people up with great experience and gets their career off to the best possible start. So, just give me a little bit of a feel for some of the projects that you specifically ... I mean, obviously digital, you talked about how broad it is, but what are some of the core priorities across digital the students union in Leeds is facing?

Jasper: So we have operational priorities. So, for example, I mentioned earlier around our EPOS system, so obviously if we don't have tills that work that we can't sell things in our outlets. Your fond memories that may have involved buying a drink but we now need to sell you that drink on a platform. One of the things that has happened through the pandemic is we've become more and more cashless. So you can imagine that also attached to that are new platforms that we've never had before. So for example, during the pandemic table service platforms that allowed students to rather than queue up at the bar – which may or may not have been your experience – but to say, look, why doesn't the bar just come to me?

Jasper: In terms of our building, we have a display network. So advertising network, one of the things that's really important to us is sustainability. So a project that the device and infrastructure team is looking at the moment is adding additional Android units to the back of those because then we can power off those units at night. And we've worked out that it will not only consume less energy doing so, which I'm sure your listeners know is not the cheapest thing in the world right now. So we've projected that will really fit into our sustainability agenda, but also save us quite a lot of money over the period of the year.

Jasper: If we can power down these advertising units overnight, other projects are often around upgrade or helping us do something in a way that is more efficient because it's been taken from a manual process to a digitized process. And again, that's an ongoing stream of activity of looking at how do we do this thing now? Is there a better way to do it? How does technology fit into that? The tough part of my job is really that we have the consumers of the future. So a student coming to university at age 18, for example, they live their life on Netflix, on TikTok, on platforms that have really well designed algorithms that learn about their behaviour, learn what they want, and then feed it to them in a 'Here's what you want', but also with the discovery layer on top and they bring all those expectations to us. And so my job is to say, right, well, how can we come close to meeting those expectations? Or even if we can't come close, how can we work towards meeting those expectations in interface, in service interaction and also in look and feel?

Andrew: Yeah, I can imagine that's, that's one of your biggest challenges in that you've got that very demanding audience that will spend a lot of time on social media. They'll be very familiar with sharing perhaps the good and the bad experiences. And yet as a non-profit, of course, you have quite a lot of cost pressures I imagine as well.

Jasper: Yeah, and I think it's about being clever. So for example, one of the during the pandemic year 2020, we had a cohort of students joining in that September who we knew were going to have a very digitally focused welcome experience. So instead of their introduction to university being very centred around the campus, it was going to be mixed. That was going to be some campus, but a lot digital. And we produced a number of websites and online platforms to help them to guide them through that experience. But then because we produced all these platforms, we realized that, well, they were going to get lost.

Jasper: And so an obvious way of bringing these all together was an app. However, as you point out, the charity budgets and also the time pressure we were under didn't necessarily mean that we could go through that sort of native app development process and launch it on iOS and also on Android. So what we did there was we built a web app on the WordPress platform. There's essentially a good way of looking at it. It's like a remote control. It just had loads of jump off points to all these websites, and that was hugely successful in providing students with a means to navigate through that really digital welcome.

Jasper: We recently did our summer ball, so this is where we take over the whole building. We have like fairgrounds, we have nightclubs, all the nightclubs are open, we have artists travelling and we did that for the first time since pre-pandemic. We did that in June and we actually took that app that we developed at relatively low cost that still exists as our main app. We reskinned it for the ball. And basically that was the sort of 'how I navigate through the ball' experience. And it was really, really positive that proof of concept was accessed by about 6000 different students, which is a number that's slightly higher than the people who attended. So people were using it not only to find out more about the ball, but also the people that went to the ball used it to try and work out, 'Right, okay, what's on at ten? Where do I find food?' And so it isn't necessarily about just putting our hands up and going, 'we can't afford it'. It's about right, well, how can we come close to what we'd like to do, but potentially using clever creative ways to do so?

Andrew: And clearly that's a key part of the overall customer experience, which I know is something that you're also passionate about, being able to provide that solution that makes people get the most out of a particular opportunity or experience. You talked about repurposing as well. Is that something that you find you have to do quite a lot with limited budgets or is that just being smart about how you use resources? And interestingly, you talked about sustainability earlier as well. By extension, do you feel there's a need to become more sustainable, not just from a cost point of view, but from a more general resource point of view when you're developing platforms like that?

Jasper: Yeah. So I suppose I mentioned the constant evolution an organisation like ours is going through because our audience is the consumer of the future. So the trends that might be at an average awareness level in the general population are probably higher in some of the student population. So we focus on transgender data awareness and how people want to refer to their gender, their pronouns. So we've seen that type of pressure on data storage probably before there's been that sort of pressure on wider government systems, on wider organisations.

Jasper: And similarly with sustainability, I think – I don't want to make this about climate change, but obviously climate change has become generally aware to the population. But I think students who are coming through, who are ultimately the younger generation, are perhaps more passionate than the average person in the UK. That obviously gives an agenda to our organisation to do more and to care more about this. So yeah, we are starting to feed this into the decisions that we make when we're procuring software, when we're procuring hardware. And I think it's very much about going on a journey from where we are currently. So in some areas our procurement might not really involve a consideration of sustainability to considering, 'Right, well, how can we go to the first stage,' which is gathering information about the sustainability of the hardware we buy, the platforms that we use, and then moving down the line to ... Right, well, now we've got the information gathering stage, how can we then go further to making procurement decisions where that's a more prioritised factor than just being a piece of information?

Jasper: On your second point about resource management, sometimes it's just about finding a different type of product potentially. So I'll give you one example. When I arrived, we had a legacy website which was with a supplier that was mismatched to us as an organisation in terms of the cost of their support model. There were also a number of considerations with the platform that they provided.

Andrew: When you say mismatch, you mean that it was probably more of a corporate-focused platform, bigger budgets, that sort of thing?

Jasper: Well, a combination of both, really. So I think they were they were an agency that worked really well with global enterprise. And some of the content management website platforms that they use with global enterprise come with huge licensing fees. And so rather than use those platforms, they'd used an open source platform, but really they picked the wrong one. And obviously in working with them, I began to realize that actually their expertise wasn't in the open source platform, that prior to me people in the organisation had steered them towards using. It was actually in the sort of enterprise platforms where the license cost of them would just be impossible for us.

Jasper: So in trying to compromise to work with us or to or seeing the opportunity of working with us, actually we'd created a sort of situation where we were on the wrong platform and ultimately with the wrong supplier. But in that particular project, there was some unmet functionality around our temporary employment agency, the ability to post jobs, which students would apply for, and then the sort of temporary jobs, not necessarily just for the union, but for many of the partners, sports stadiums and things like that. So rather than commission them to bespoke-build a job section into this website, which was a significant reinvention of the wheel, we found a US based SaaS platform where for a couple of hundred dollars now we had a platform that had much more functionality. It was mature in its lifecycle, unlocked new possibilities for us. So advertisers paying for job adverts with their credit cards so much less procurement and finance activity for us. And in that case it wasn't so much about scaling something down. It was just saying, right, well, can we do this in a completely different way that might be compatible with our cost base.

Andrew: Yeah. And do you feel that you were forced into making a compromise around that – a compromise with a positive outcome by the sounds of it – but presumably there are compromises along the way to get to that satisfactory outcome?

Jasper: I don't think in that case it was a compromise because the compromise would have been if we'd commissioned the bespoke development on that platform because then we'd have compromised a lot of what we wanted to do actually by switching it to a different type of platform that was already a mature stage. We didn't have to compromise at all. In fact, we got a lot more than we were expecting and it opened new doors for us.

Andrew: Sure. Yeah. So by the sounds of it, it's a case of a bit of mix and match. You pick your battles. There are opportunities where you might want to go down a particular route, but actually don't ignore the fact that there may be solutions that already exist out there.

Jasper: Yes, definitely. I mean, the one part I think that as an organisation that we would hopefully do more of in the future is around how we might change to use platforms in a more efficient way that might suit our sort of resources. So I'll give a bit of an example. So sure, you've worked with enough projects where people go, 'I'd like the kitchen sink and I want a toaster, and I also want it to spread the jam on the toast'. And you go, 'Well, okay, if we do all of that, it'll cost a fortune and it'll take years to develop'. And then then you go through this iterative process where they go, 'maybe we make the toast ourselves, maybe actually we could buy a canopy rather than ...' So you go through a process of reduction.

Jasper: However, another route is actually you split apart those tasks and you have different things to do doing that. And we've done this recently where we looked at a particular process in the organisation and we went through a process of service blueprinting. So looking at how the service works at the moment and then the sort of the matching exercise on top of that is to do some customer journey mapping. So you've got both sides. So internally the service blueprinting sort of details what you do and then the customer experience mapping is right.

Jasper: Well how does that match to the customer experience through those different stages and then going through that blueprinting because we didn't just want to blueprint what was happening now, we wanted to blueprint where we might go to. We've realised that actually we could pull out a process that was embedded with another one and then you've got two separate processes, at which point they can be more tightly defined. They can be delivered in a shorter timescale because you're gluing less together.

Jasper: So I think that's another part of the approach I see in terms of being operationally efficient and making better use of resources to look at, like when you do something that's ten things glued together, can you say, 'Right, let's ignore the one that we never really do any of anyway?' Like is this nine? We take out three and two and then you've got and then five and then you've got three different processes and we might find three optimized platforms that really help us do those very well. Or actually we find two and we have to build one and that helps you move to a more efficient operation. And ultimately, digital's about making things run better and helping. In our case, students interact with us better.

Andrew: Sure. Yeah. It's quite a nice segue there in terms of introducing improvements, making things better. The phrase that we all hear all the time is digital transformation. And I know you've written an article with some perspectives on digital transformation. It was interesting that the image you used on that was a picture of a chrysalis hanging, and that represents an example of what is a very clear transformation. You go from caterpillar to a butterfly, the two barely recognizable – digital transformation in reality doesn't quite go like that. Do you think we're using the wrong term with it being iterative processes? It's not really a journey that ever ends either, is it?

Jasper: No. Perhaps the biggest realization they've had in the last four years is that the idea you have a start and finish program is pretty old-fashioned. You're just in a constant process of making things better and looking at where you're at and how you can make things better. But if that's the reality of digital and IT work in a lot of the contexts that we all exist, you've got to put forward a business case, you've got to look at the outcomes. And so in the sort of agile terminology of Sprint, actually, it does make sense to talk about digital transformation because you have an idea of, 'Right, well, what's the immediate next step? Where do you think we'll go with that?'

Jasper: But yeah, I agree with you in terms of that terminology, it suggests that you can transform. It's done – 'Well done, everyone! We've digitally transformed, no more needed!' [laughs] Well, I've never got to that point. And I think the next stage for us as an organisation actually is data transformation. And so once we start to use data more, as we start to look at how we can increase the speed of data flowing through our organisation, look at the linkages and really use data to help to empower us to make evidence-based decisions in a way that we've never done before. That will no doubt mean that we'll have to transform some other areas in terms of how we process information, where we store it, and the sort of cloud data warehousing that might be required.

Jasper: So yeah, in that sense that other programs, including the sort of overall organisational strategy, they just continually create a need to do more to change. So no, I think I've agreed and disagreed in the same, in the same answer. So hope that helps you! [laughs]

Andrew: Absolutely. I mean it's the phrase that I think is broadly understood. We all know what we're talking about if digital transformation comes up. But I think it's the practicality. And arguably for those who aren't necessarily involved in delivering digital transformation, but perhaps oversee it from a distance – if that makes sense – that reality is that it's not something that you can set a budget for in 2022 because you need a budget for it in 2023, 24 and beyond, because inevitably environments change around, the technology, of course, changes as well. The needs will change inevitably.

Andrew: And you just constantly learn. You learn as you go from one series of activities into the next, and inevitably you will get to a stage with some of those activities where you look and think, 'Well, we wouldn't build it this way if we did it again. So there's that constant evolution and that idea that you switched then into a different realm of transformation. Data transformation is quite interesting as well. I mean, data, obviously we know about huge growth, the challenges with it, but is that a challenge or is it an opportunity for Leeds Students Union?

Jasper: Both. So I think the opportunity is to really represent what we achieve for students in a way that we probably don't at the moment. So the example I've been using a lot with colleagues is, we support 350 clubs and societies to operate. So these are anything from a hiking club through to ... I know there's the manga club, they're interested in manga. So we support these sort of sub-organisations to meet and give students the access to develop the opportunities, to develop skills, to make friends, to improve that non-academic part of their university experience.

Jasper: We don't have data about all their operations, so in a way we may not fully understand what they do, but also because we're not capturing data about all their activities, we're not able to shout about them. And a hiking one is a good example because if we're able to say, 'Right, how often do you go hiking? Right, you do it once a month. How many metres do you walk? But how many people go on these?' And actually what you've got there is biometric data, health data.

Jasper: And so if one of our aims and certainly the university is to help students have a healthier existence, then actually it provides a really interesting metric. The amount of kilometres the hiking club have walked as to how we're helping a certain group of students improve their health and also spend time together and bond. And if that's just one, and we have 350 on top of the other activities that we do, there's a huge amount of data that exists there that at the moment we're not really grabbing. And therefore, when we're looking at making decisions around what we support, what we put our resources into, we're doing that using the experience of really experienced colleagues. We have loads of people who've worked in our organisation for a long period of time, but data could add another level of insight into what we do. And also we can replay it back to students in a way that say, well, actually you care about the kilometres that we've walked and that provides another level of support as well as facilitating the activity through the accounting finance software that we provide to them, etc.

Andrew: That's a really interesting application. And as you say, not only does it support that university experience, but it's supporting that wider life experience of being more healthy. And yeah, really interesting application. What have you learned from working across groups and teams around building a team that is focused on that digital transformation, even though we think the terminology may be not ideal? I mean, presumably you've got a small number of colleagues, but then you've got a broader number of people that you're interacting with, presumably with the university, as you mentioned, things like the hiking club and so on. How do you get their buy-in to embrace these kinds of opportunities?

Jasper: There's a top line answer I can give to that, which is involving people in co-creating that change. So we recently changed our membership platform. So there's lots of sector-specific software providers in a student union market and a number of platforms help you do some of the sort of big activities that student unions have to do. So cross-campus voting. We have a set of elected officers every year, also I mentioned about the clubs and societies, the ability to buy memberships, the ability for committees to manage those memberships. So there are a number of platforms that support those operations. We wanted to consider moving away from a platform that we'd been for a decade.

Jasper: And the way that we did that was we embedded some staff in a temporary basis that worked with our platforms team in the team that worked on those platforms. And so it's probably a sort of a slight adaptation of an agile methodology that we had people that represented those different teams that worked on that platform that had to use that platform. And they were part of creating the set of criteria that allowed us to go and find a new supplier. And also the great thing about that, because they were involved in the journey to that point and which included testing out a number of different platforms. So not just working on the paper requirements, but also 'Right, let's get some platforms in and let's try them'. And also it prompted us to update our data structures and look at how we use the existing platform to better inform whether or not we stuck to that or went for a different one.

Jasper: So, to wrap it up, it's about involving people from those teams in the transformation rather than just going, 'We've done some transformation – ta-dah!' Which I've found doesn't often work because people go, 'Well, that's great, but I didn't ask for it' or 'I don't want to change' or 'I like the old one'. So if you involve people throughout that process, that's been the source of success I find.

Andrew: Yeah, I think it's about introducing change for the right reasons, isn't it? Not just because technology is there to do so. There may be perfectly good reasons why people are still using pen and paper in certain circumstances, and that a tablet to capture that information just isn't the right thing for the environment that the people are working in or other factors.

Jasper: Well, you can do both. I'm holding up my Remarkable tablet, which is both the paper experience, but electronic. So you can blur those worlds as well.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, totally. Really fascinating to hear some of those insights. We are approaching time, we've been chatting for just about half an hour, and I'm going to ask our series of questions that we've been asking to all of our guests in this series just to get to know people a little bit better. So we're going to kick off into this series of five questions, Jasper, if we can, fairly quick answers, if you can. And the first question is, what is the one app website or piece of software, personal or professional, that you can't live without?

Jasper: I would say LinkedIn, I'm really broadening my sources of information around data, around machine learning, around AI. And so I've found that sort of following people who are more experienced in the space than I am has been great for learning about those topics. Also, it's helped with recruitment. Some of the people that have applied for us recently, they could get a better understanding of my strategy, where I was going, by looking at some of my content on LinkedIn. So that's been great from that perspective.

Andrew: Okay, great stuff. Yeah, quite a big LinkedIn user myself.

Jasper: In fact, you found me on LinkedIn, didn't you? So you asked me to be on here on LinkedIn. So probably underlines why it's useful.

Andrew: [laughs] Exactly! What's exciting you in digital at the moment? I know you've written about things like digital transformation, which we talked about, customer experience, which we touched on a little bit and equally a little bit of the data and AI side. But what particularly is exciting you in digital at the moment?

Jasper: Yeah, I think it's a combination of two things: I would say data mesh and machine learning AI. So data mesh is not always seeing data as a product and potentially creating distributed responsibility for data management and data use in an organization which probably is a better approach than that sort of centralised mega department trying to draw it all in and in connection with that result. There's no point in having loads of source of data. We don't do anything with them. So how can easier access to things like machine learning and AI through AI as a service, for example, allow a relatively small platform, something that I might commission from an agency or an independent developer? How could that link in with a Google AI platform? Use that to provide an amazing amount of personalization and functionality in a way that was impossible a couple of years ago?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Back to that theme idea of sort of piggybacking on other platforms – you talked about building that app on WordPress, for example, using existing platforms where you can, which of course no doubt helps you to maximise the reach of the budgets that you have to work with.

Jasper: Yeah.

Andrew: Okay. If you had an extra hour every day, how would you spend that time? I know you're still studying, so maybe it's writing that dissertation at the moment?

Jasper: No, I'd say exercise. So I think you work better, you think better, etc. if you fit in regular exercise and that's at various points of life – that's something I struggle with. So yeah, if I've got a magic hour and I'd have to like not know about that hour in advance, I think if it just magically appeared that it was like, you have a bonus, our time has stopped, then yeah, I would probably exercise in that hour.

Andrew: So yeah, get out and about and keep busy, keep active. That's good. What do you think is the most important personal attribute that you bring to your role?

Jasper: I think it's enthusiasm. So one of the things that you have to do is get people get people to see how technology can benefit them and how it will make their life easier – or achieve more for students in our case. And I think that's hard to do without enthusiasm, if people go, 'Oh, that's dry and boring, why should I care about it?' Whereas if you can really sell, for want of a better word, if you can really, really help people see that this a positive thing for them and their role and potentially their career, then that to me is the most important attribute.

Andrew: And that passion, enthusiasm absolutely comes across as we've been talking today. So I think that's clearly very strong. And final question, which I've asked everybody, and is probably particularly relevant for you, given what you were saying about involving students, in bringing students to work for the students union and giving them the opportunities and experience. What advice would you give to someone at the start of their career in digital?

Jasper: I think, keep learning. I think that's always been true. So I started my career arguably while still at school. My parents happened to be next to British Telecom's main research base. So I worked on the world's first interactive TV trial. And also, even in that sort of work experience point of my career, I was given loads of challenges, like, 'This Perl script doesn't work anymore'. So I'm like, 'What's Perl? Well, I'm going to have to learn regular expressions. What are they?' So because I'm passionate about continuing to learn, I found out and got the script working brilliant. A couple of years after, I remember a line manager going, 'Jasper, we need to simulate satellite communications.' What? So then I found out that it was TCP/IP, the stack. So then, okay, fine. 'Well, I'll build something that mimics a TCP/IP stack, etc., etc..' So as I've got more into my career, it's been more about learning about people and how people change and how organisations structure, how customer experience is developed.

Jasper: And again, as long as you keep learning, you'll never be out of date. Whereas I think if you have a growth mindset – I suppose is the jargon term – if you stick to that growth mindset, I think you'll never struggle because whatever barriers you come to, you'll be like, 'Well, I'll just learn my way around them'. And that can be through what you're doing specifically or any challenges in your role or your organisation. As long as you're committed to learning, you'll be fine.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And that whole point around that transformation journey, which it is, a journey rather than a destination, there is of course inevitable learning along the way and you find different ways to do things. You find more efficient ways of doing things because in our world it's a techie world. There's inevitably several ways to approach things – more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying goes – but of course, not every way is the best way. It doesn't mean every other way is the wrong way. But yeah, it's that learning that ultimately refines that knowledge and helps you to improve.

Great. Well, look, I've really enjoyed having that conversation with you. Where might listeners be able to find more about you? You talked about LinkedIn and we can put your LinkedIn address on the website with the show notes and include it in the transcript. But where would you like people to follow up with you if they wanted to?

Jasper: Sure. Yeah, drop me a line on LinkedIn. Also, if you look at Leeds University Union and look at contacts at the Contact Page, you'll also find me on there. But yeah, to be honest, because of my really long surname, google my name, you'll find me. So that's been one of the positive advantages of being truly locatable in a way that other people perhaps aren't.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Great stuff. Well, like I say, we will link up those in the show notes as well. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and share your insights with such enthusiasm. Thank you very much.

Jasper: Thank you for having me.

Andrew: So thank you for tuning in to the podcast today. My guest was Jasper Hegarty-Ditton from Leeds University Students Union. I really appreciate all the time that our guests give to come and speak on the podcast. And you can tell Jasper is really passionate about driving positive change to students in Leeds while keeping things lean and focused around the impact his and his team's work have on the student experience. Links from today's episode will be added to the show notes, which you can find at adigital.agency/podcast. Of course, the podcast can be found across all popular apps, so please do tell your friends and colleagues about the current series. We appreciate you sharing the show on your social media channels, perhaps even leaving a rating on Apple Podcasts. And we welcome any comments.

So do get in touch with me either on Twitter or LinkedIn. Be great to hear from you. If you know someone who would make a great guest, then please do point them in my direction – I'm always on the lookout for people to come and share their insights and help others learn from their experiences. And finally, it would, of course, be remiss of me to say that if you're looking for an agency partner to support projects as part of your own organisation's digital transformation, then please do check us out at A Digital. We'd love to speak with you if there's a complex challenge that you're looking to solve. So I'll be back in a couple of weeks’ time with episode number 50, which at the time of recording is still a good few weeks away. Hopefully we'll have something special up our sleeves before then. Take care. Thanks very much for listening and I'll see you next time.