Session Details

Some of the most impactful improvements come from small, practical changes made by the people doing the work every day. In this interactive session, participants will be introduced to the principles of Continuous Improvement and how they can be applied to everyday challenges, opportunities, and frustrations in the workplace.

The session will explore the benefits of a Continuous Improvement mindset, including reducing inefficiencies, improving service delivery, enhancing stakeholder experiences, and creating more sustainable ways of working. Participants will also be introduced to the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) framework, a simple but powerful approach for testing, evaluating, and embedding improvements.

To bring these concepts to life, attendees will learn and practise a practical Continuous Improvement tool that can be applied to their own work. The session is designed to provide a useful introduction to Continuous Improvement and leave participants with a practical technique they can use to identify and explore improvement opportunities within their teams and work environments.

Whether you are new to Continuous Improvement or simply curious about how to improve everyday processes, this session will provide a practical starting point for building improvement thinking into your daily work.

Elissa Whan, Program Director, Continuous Improvement

Pierre Villiers De Casanove, Continuous Improvement Senior Lead

Andrew Dunstan, Senior Continuous Improvement Specialist

I’m on a mission: to eliminate the ums and erms when delivering presentations. Public speaking is a powerful vehicle for driving change and sharing ideas, yet it remains one of the most common sources of workplace stress. When staff members struggle with delivery, high-impact messages lose their resonance, and the presenters themselves experience a heavy toll on their professional wellbeing. This practical session directly addresses the subtheme "Resilience from Within: Skills for Sustainable Strength" by empowering staff to elevate their public speaking and storytelling skills, aiming to increase their professional impact and reduce presentation-related anxiety.

Participants will build tangible communication skills. The session will break down the mechanics of impactful delivery, teaching staff how to transform complex information into compelling narratives that captivate an audience. Alongside these storytelling frameworks, attendees will learn actionable techniques to manage the psychological and physical stress responses that often accompany public speaking. In short: great design and great delivery.

By replacing anxiety with capability, staff members will dramatically improve how their messages are received. More importantly, building this competence fosters genuine confidence, protecting personal wellbeing and transforming public speaking into a sustainable, empowering work practice. Attendees will walk away not only looking at public speaking from a different lens but with the internal resilience needed to share their voice safely and sustainably in any professional setting.

Sebastian Cortes Lopez, Product Owner (Current Students), CIO Group

Are you sick of working in silos, reinventing the wheel, and not knowing who that person you always pass in the corridor is? If you're tired of working side by side instead of together, it's time to explore the possibilities of a Community of Practice (CoP).

From the obvious benefits (knowledge sharing, skills development, and networking) to the unexpected surprises (Pomodoro sessions, job opportunities, and collective advocacy) establishing a CoP in the Faculty of Arts has completely changed the way we work and enabled operations staff at all levels to collaborate across – not just within – schools.

In this session, we'll demystify what a CoP actually is and provide you with a roadmap for setting up your own. We'll share insights from our own experience and the essentials you need to get started. 
So come along to learn how a CoP could transform the way you work too: because, as we have found, taking the time to work together is worth it.

Lauren Sanders, School Operations Coordinator, Faculty of Arts

Lou Benson, School Operations Coordinator, Faculty of Arts

Chloe Mackenzie, School Operations Coordinator, Faculty of Arts

Rohan Jolly, School Support Officer, Faculty of Arts

As the University of Melbourne continues to build its AI capability, staff are increasingly moving beyond experimentation to explore how generative AI can solve real workplace challenges.

GenAI@Work is the foundational platform for shaping this journey for academic and professional staff across the institution. Driving impact through a hub-and-spoke model that combines central guidance, domain-specific guidance, and supported technologies, the model enables connected community learning and discipline contextualised innovation. Through Communities of Practice meetups, showcases and training sessions, and events such as hackathons and practice exchanges, The hub leads with a future focus and is a core enabler within the University to empower people and performance by adopting GenAI in their disciplines.

This session brings that approach to life through two practical demonstrations from staff who have used AI to address genuine workplace problems. One showcase explores how an AI-enabled solution was developed while keeping human judgement at the centre of complex decision-making. The other demonstrates how AI was used to transform large volumes of unstructured information into organised, reusable insights to support planning and analysis. Beyond the solutions themselves, presenters will share the challenges they were trying to solve, the decisions they made along the way, and the lessons learned through experimentation and implementation.

Attendees will gain practical insight into how to identify suitable opportunities for AI, assess where it can add value, navigate governance and risk considerations, and select approaches that best fit the problem. The session is designed for staff at all levels of AI experience and focuses on practical takeaways that can be applied regardless of role, discipline or preferred AI tools, and your confidence with using GenAI today.

Participants will leave with ideas for their own work, a clearer understanding of how AI-enabled innovation can be approached responsibly, and connections to a growing community helping turn curiosity into capability across the University.

Cory Dal Ponte, Skill & Capability Lead, Organisation Development

Rina Gao, Collaboration Applications Manager, Enterprise Technology

Rahul Grover, Experience Design Engineer, Service Transformation, Enterprise Services Group

Tom Cougan, Service Improvement Lead, Service Transformation, Enterprise Services Group

Grace Pelchen, Service Improvement Analyst, Service Transformation, Enterprise Services Group

Matt’s presentation will focus on the lessons he has learned whilst driving the evolution of an 85-year-old education provider, through a period of acquisitions, sector-wide disruption, complete re-imagining of complex business processes -all focused on responding to rapidly evolving customer needs.

Matt will share insights around how he prioritised each aspect of change, and the need to address People, Process, Technology and Data.  He’ll explore the architecture required to create a culture of continuous improvement, the need for an inclusive approach (great ideas don’t only come from the c-suite), and some of the major risks that need to be considered / addressed at each level of maturity.

This is a practical session, where Matt will share real-life examples of how to navigate the highly complex, ever-changing needs of internal & external stakeholders, and what he might do differently if he had the chance to start again.

This is a must-see session for anyone, especially those who are beginning their own AI-driven transformation program, or those who feel stuck in POC-purgatory & are looking to validate how to get started, and where to go next.

Matt Stejer, Head of Product Technologies and AI, Australian Institute of Management

The term mental load has become more familiar in recent years, but the popular understanding of the concept often reduces it down to managing a list of household chores and logistics. Sociologist Leah Ruppanner reveals that for women, mental load actually goes much deeper: It’s a complex form of emotional thinking that is invisible, boundaryless, and enduring.

In Drained, Ruppanner outlines the eight distinct types of mental load and highlights what makes them so uniquely heavy for women:

• Life organization: Staying on top of planning and tasks
• Emotional support: Checking in on family, friends, and coworkers
• Relationship hygiene: Maintaining strong social connections
• Magic making: Carrying on traditions and creating special life moments
• Dream building: Helping others fulfill their passions and ambitions
• Individual upkeep: Keeping fit and healthy
• Safety: Protecting family and loved ones from danger
• Meta-care: Raising children who will thrive in the future

Prof. Leah Ruppanner, Professor in Sociology, School of Social and Political Sciences

In late 2024, a small team at the University of Melbourne was drowning in enquiries, managing pre-placement compliance for thousands of students with no extra resourcing. Michael Roldan, with no IT background, decided there had to be a better way and built an AI tool to help.

That decision led to BLAKE, a staff-led governance framework for building safe, effective AI tools. Response times dropped from days to same-day, staff confidence improved, and student privacy and compliance were never compromised. BLAKE has since been adopted by teams at UNSW, AUT Auckland, RMIT University and the University of Guelph Canada, and is the subject of a peer-reviewed paper currently under editorial review in the Work Integrated Learning Journal.

This session is not about the technology. It is proof that any professional staff member can spot a problem in their own workflow and build a practical, governance-sound solution to fix it. Attendees will see the framework in action and hear what colleagues at other institutions have built with it.

Imagine handing off the repetitive parts of your role to a tool you built yourself, freeing up time, energy and control for the work that needs your judgement. This session shows you the how, showcases what others have already built to inspire your own ideas, and leaves you with a proven AI framework to take back to your team.

Michael Roldan, Senior School Operations Officer, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, Faculty of Science

Providing significant development opportunities for professional staff can be challenging to prioritise alongside core duties of the role, workload flux, deadlines and process improvement programs. In a rapidly changing world and workplace, embracing flexibility in the development planning and career progression of staff is critical to success. 

Internal Secondments or Internal Temporary Transfers are an excellent opportunity for staff to accelerate their career by adapting their existing transferable skills to a role sideways or further up the career ladder, enabling them to learn new skills, in a new department, or to engage with new staff, processes and systems that they would often otherwise not have the opportunity to experience in an otherwise job-insecure manner. 

Come and join this session where Dale Baum (Serial Seconder) and Tracey Holding (MDHS HR Business Partner) explore all the benefits of internal secondments and the opportunities it provides to staff members, their supervisors, the team, business units and the University as a whole, and how to best plan and approach temporary internal transfer opportunities.

Dale Baum, Health and Safety Systems Lead, Health and Safety Services, Enterprise Services Group

Tracey Holding, HR Business Partner, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences.

Professional staff face unprecedented demands.

This presentation offers a practical, evidence-informed pathway to resilience that participants can implement immediately.

By centring the body, we build organisational wellbeing from the ground up, one breath, one movement, one moment at a time. No prior experience is required. All practices are trauma-informed and fully inclusive.

Ange La Scala, Group Fitness Coordinator, MU Sport, SASS

Communities of the future cannot be built only through programs, policies or economic growth. They must be built through belonging, trust, relationships and shared responsibility. This presentation will explore how Indigenous-led approaches to business, leadership and systems change can help create more inclusive, resilient and connected communities.

Paul Paton, Associate Director, Dilin Duwa Centre for Indigenous Business Leadership, Faculty of Business and Economics

Derek Gascoigne, UniSuper

Innovation doesn't start with technology — it starts with culture. In this session, we explore the principles that drive Amazon's culture of innovation, from "Day One" thinking to Working Backwards from the customer, and shows how these ideas apply far beyond the tech industry. Drawing on real higher education case studies, we share how institutions across Australia and around the world are putting AI into practice today, as a practical tool that is already reducing manual effort, enabling smarter decision-making, and freeing staff to focus on work that matters. Examples include AI-powered platforms that transform hours of content creation into automated workflows, data unification projects that eliminate repetitive manual processing, and intelligent learning tools designed with human oversight at the center.

Elly Juniper, Head of Education APAC, Amazon Web Services

AI is changing more than the way we work. It's changing what leadership looks like.

As AI becomes embedded in universities, leaders need to do more than adopt new technology. They need to help others navigate change with confidence.

In this interactive session, we'll explore what effective leadership looks like in an AI-enabled world, challenge common assumptions, and discuss practical ways leaders can build curiosity, confidence, and capability within their teams.

Zac Ashkanasy, Principal and Global Higher Education Lead, Nous Group

In an interconnected world, meaningful cross‑border communities need intentional, culturally responsive practices, not just one‑off projects. This session explores how international partnerships and intercultural competence initiatives can cultivate enduring communities of practice that support belonging, trust and collaborative problem‑solving.

Drawing on Asialink’s flagship BRIDGE School Partnerships and Asialink Leaders Programs, we present practical tools and short case vignettes demonstrating impact and lessons learned. Participants will see how cultural intelligence, values mapping, high/low‑context communication frames and reflective activities surface assumptions (for example, differing perceptions of time, hierarchy and collaboration) and enable clearer expectations, better teamwork and more culturally aware communities.

We highlight enabling conditions: reciprocity, trust‑building, storytelling, culturally grounded facilitation and attention to data and digital ethics when using platforms to sustain engagement. Indigenous perspectives are foregrounded to demonstrate long‑term relational approaches and stewardship.

Through a brief applied exercise and concrete templates, attendees will leave with ready‑to‑use tools to design inclusive engagement, navigate difference and plan for sustained, scalable cross‑border communities. Practical tips for evaluation and accessibility will support immediate application in professional and educational settings.

Emeline Gillingham, Assistant Manager, International Partnerships, Education, Asialink.

"You can just do things."

It's a throwaway line, but it became a bit of a catchphrase in my team, and it genuinely changed how we work.

When AI tools started showing up in design and research, a lot of us were quietly worried. The tools could write the copy, mock up the screen, run the analysis. All things people had spent years getting good at. The obvious response is to argue that the human is irreplaceable. We did the opposite and went and learned the tools instead.

This session is what we actually did, in five steps.

Get everyone on the same tool. When one person works something out, everyone else can copy it that afternoon.

Show people the good stuff, not just the basics. If all you ever demonstrate is a better spellcheck, that's all anyone will use it for.

Get proper permission from leadership. People experiment much more freely once they know they're allowed to.

Encourage people to use AI at home, on things that don't matter. That's where the confidence comes from, not from training.

Build a habit instead of running an event. We do a small experiment every week. A group of people from different teams also got together to learn this properly and then teach everyone else, on top of their normal jobs. Nobody got a budget or a new title.

None of this needs a technical background. You'll get something out of this talk you can try yourself.

David Mulholland, Associate Director, Service Transformation, Enterprise Services Group

Simon Brown-Greaves - Assure

Effective communication and collaboration between professional staff, administrative departments, and academic staff are essential for creating efficient, supportive, and productive university environments. However, differences in priorities, workflows, organisational structures, and communication practices can sometimes create barriers that impact relationships, service delivery, and institutional outcomes.

This interactive workshop will explore common communication challenges experienced across professional, administrative, and academic areas. Participants will be invited to reflect on their own experiences and identify factors that contribute to misunderstandings, duplication of effort, delays in decision-making, and missed opportunities for collaboration. Through facilitated discussion, the workshop will examine how differing perspectives, expectations, and organisational processes influence communication across teams.

Following a brief overview of key themes and challenges, participants will engage in small-group discussions to share examples of successful and unsuccessful communication practices within their institutions. Groups will then work collaboratively to identify practical strategies for improving communication, strengthening relationships, and fostering a more collaborative culture across professional and academic boundaries.

The workshop aims to generate actionable ideas that participants can apply within their own contexts, while also providing an opportunity to learn from colleagues facing similar challenges. By encouraging open dialogue and collective problem-solving, the session seeks to promote greater understanding, trust, and partnership between professional staff, administrative units, and academic colleagues.

Participants will leave with a range of practical approaches and insights that can support more effective collaboration, enhance workplace relationships, and contribute to improved institutional effectiveness.

Bernadette van Lunenburg, Lecturer in Management and Marketing, Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics

How do we move wellbeing beyond programs and campaigns and make it part of everyday work life?

This session shares the story behind Beyond the Desk: Wellbeing at Work, a staff-led podcast created by the SASS Wellbeing Committee to spark practical conversations about wellbeing through the experiences of SASS teams. Designed around the themes of Health, Relationships and Time, the podcast uses storytelling and peer learning to explore what helps people stay connected, healthy and sustainable at work.

Hear from wellbeing committee members and podcast participants as they reflect on the impact of sharing their stories, the lessons learned, and how storytelling can strengthen connection, trust and engagement across an organisation. Participants will also take part in a short interactive activity to reflect on their own wellbeing practices and contribute ideas for future wellbeing conversations and resources.

Join us to explore how staff-led storytelling can help embed wellbeing into everyday workplace culture.

Tim Brabazon, Director, Student Services

Kate Hatzopoulos, Communications Consultant, Student Communications, SASS

Sandra Macriyiannis, Business Operations Manager, Video and Media Team, Teaching & Learning Innovation, SASS

Nhat Ngo, Coordinator, Academic Support

Liliana Braumberger, Learning Analyst, Academic Integrity

Phil Shaw, Content Creator, Major Projects

As generative AI reshapes the way we work, the opportunity extends far beyond productivity gains and faster task completion. The real opportunity lies in using AI to create capacity for higher-value work, better decision-making, improved experiences, and new ways to solve complex challenges.

This interactive session explores how professional staff can move from simply using AI to reimagining our work. Drawing on real experiences from the University of Melbourne's AI journey, Cory and Rina will discuss how AI is changing the nature of work, the value of lifelong learning, and the mindsets and behaviours that adapt, grow, and create greater impact in areas that matter to our community. Participants will explore how AI can create capacity to operate at a higher level, contribute more meaningfully, and focus on work that aligns with their strengths and interests.

Through practical examples, facilitated discussion and reflective activities, participants will explore how to identify meaningful opportunities for AI within your own roles, teams, and disciplines. The session will challenge participants to think beyond productivity, and consider how AI can help create greater individual, team, and organisational impact.

Designed to leave participants of all levels of GenAI experience with practical questions and new perspectives. Participants will gain a practical framework to help identify opportunities where AI can enable innovation and improve outcomes.

Cory Dal Ponte, Skill & Capability Lead, Organisation Development

Rina Gao, Collaboration Applications Manager, Enterprise Technology

Most conversations about AI at work start and end with productivity: faster emails, tidier spreadsheets, shorter meetings. But the more interesting question is what happens when AI moves from the inbox to the whiteboard. Can these tools genuinely sharpen how we think, not just how fast we work? Can they open up creative possibilities we wouldn't have found alone, or help us solve problems we didn't know we could tackle? And just as importantly, how do we know when the human, not the AI, should be doing the thinking?

In this session, the Institute for Digital Innovation and AI (IDIA) explores what it looks like when AI becomes a thinking partner rather than a task manager, and where good judgement still belongs firmly with people. Drawing on our work with industry and research partners, we'll look beyond efficiency gains to the harder, more exciting questions: how AI is reshaping creativity, decision-making, and innovation in professional environments, where human judgement remains essential, and what that means for the way universities and their people work in the years ahead.

Jacob McMahon, Coordinator, Institute for Digital Innovation and AI, Melbourne Business School

Cheryl George, Director, Strategic Partnerships, Institute for Digital Innovation and AI, Melbourne Business School