Making Masdar Institute Communications More Efficient
Abu Dhabi, UAE • December 2014 to September 2016
The Project
The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology is in a unique position in the UAE: It is an independent, graduate-level university, and also a project born from the Masdar Initiative. As part of the Masdar Initiative, we are politically engaged with other significant UAE entities, including IRENA, the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment and others. As a university, our most important stakeholders are our faculty, students and partners.
This unique position requires the institute to be nimble in the face of urgent, high-level requests from UAE government stakeholders. For a university that sits on a significant amount of constantly changing, research driven content, this can be a challenge. Additionally, each piece of content requires input from a wide range of stakeholders – often from several different organizations.
When I joined the Institute, high-level requests were often severely delayed due to these challenges – resulting in a frustrated set of key stakeholders. Additionally, even content that was part of the daily communications workflow (such as press releases, reports, emails, speeches, etc) were delayed or tangled in confusing email threads – which resulted in significant time spent simply trying to identify the status of a particular request.
The Company
The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology
The Masdar Institute is a graduate level research university, established with MIT and focused on sustainable technology. It is the focal point of Masdar City, a futuristic sustainable city in Abu Dhabi that was created by Minister of State Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
Solving the Challenge
To turn the Masdar Institute communications department into an efficient operation, producing high-quality content quickly and nimbly, I focused on the following:
- Introduction of a collaborative, cloud-based platform for tracking and coordinating each piece of content along clear, well-defined workflows
- Introduction of cloud-based, real-time content development platforms – to allow several content editors at once with varying degrees of editing or commenting permissions
- Clear approval and input workflows, included in the header of each piece of content, to ensure that development flows in a single direction (i.e., that is doesn’t end up in a circular review cycle with a handful of stakeholders)
- Introduction of database-driven content management platforms, to hold up-to-date information that may be needed at any moment about the university and its range of research projects and initiatives
- Processes and procedures to ensure adherence to these new systems, and that regular updates are made to reference (core) content
- Development of relationships with stakeholders to ensure workflows are committed to both inside and outside of the organization
