SCS Database enhancements

Proposal Sponsor:

Ronnie Millar, Student Counselling Service

Overview

The current Student Counselling Service database needs enhanced to be able to maintain current standards. The database is fundamental to our ability to analyse and report Service statistics and to predict trends. This is essential when planning for the future using current resources.

The Service is growing in response to student demand and the present administration team do not have the resource to deal with the expected additional workload. While we have funding to increase counselling staff resource we do not have funding for additional administration staff resource.

We currently share our database with the Staff Counselling Service.

We would like to enable our counselling staff to add certain information to the database (e.g. manual addition of students). To be able to do this quickly and easily and reduce the duplication of tasks related to the database. This would depend upon the database being able to cope with several users (up to 30) at the same time.

Other contributors:

Meg Stroud, Administration Manager, Angela Robertson, Administrator

Why is it needed/What are the benefits?:

Maintenance of the database, ensuring it remains efficient in keeping important client data. To maintain current levels of efficiency we would need to employ an additional 0.33FTE administrator a year i.e. a minimum of £7,000 a year.

Fit with University Strategy

Enablers: Infrastructure

ensures that we have the information we need to support research and effective decision-making.
adapting our infrastructure to meet the changing needs, approaches and working patterns of our diverse population of staff and students
putting in place information and communications technology with the power and resilience to provide easy access to resources
taking a systematic approach to acquiring, creating, capturing, storing, presenting and managing our information resources.

Themes: Outstanding student experience

data capture takes a cohesive, inclusive and individualised approach to enhancing our student experience
promotes student health, wellbeing and safety.

Themes – Outstanding student experience

What would happen if the project did not take place?

The risk of the database failing, as a result of the increasing number of records and the increased number of staff accessing and recording data simultaneously (administrators and counsellors). If the database is not robust enough to support multiple user/simultaneous access then it will significantly compromise the ability to offer a professional service, with ensuing risks to confidentiality, supporting vulnerable students and the overall damage to the student experience.

We would have to hire an 0.33FTE administrator to cope with the expected Increase in usage in terms of increased student records accessed and increase in users.

Who does it affect?

Student counselling staff – specifically admin staff

Procurement activity required?

BI/MI requirement?

Additional Information

We share our database with Staff Counselling Service that has limited some of its functionality. For example we are unable to manually add students (e.g. students from partner institutions or awaiting matriculation numbers). It is important to be flexible in the data we input and retrieve, and for us to be sophisticated and flexible when analysing data to respond to requests (e.g. from senior management, FOIs and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy)

If it is not possible for the Staff Counselling Service to have a separate database, they may have to use our database to record data and enhancements will be necessary to accommodate this.

Compliance Justification

SCS would like this put forward as compliance, however it was in the 3-year plan 2014 - 17 for 3 years as a small project each year as Discretionary.

The workarounds are impractical and would likely need additional recruitment if this were not done. Given the significant rise in demand year on year the bulk of the work goes to the admin team.

At the end of this year there will be a 105% increase over the last four years, and then 20% per year ongoing is anticipated.

Score for Portfolio Comparison

Programme Priority	Please rank the proposal’s priority within the programme [2 of 3 within SCS]
Overall Priority	Please categorise proposal as 1/2/3 2 – failure to progress will place the business of Student Counselling Services at significant risk
Programme Scoring	1.Alignment with University Strategic Plan/Business Objectives	6
	2.Risk of not doing the project	2
	3.Benefits relative to cost	2 Cost of additional administrator = £7284 per annum
	4.Time to deliver tangible benefit	1 in relation to cost avoidance as growth of 20% for the next years forecast. The longer the delay the higher the cost.
	TOTAL SCORE	11

Planning Status:

Fully Allocated

Programme Priority:

Portfolio:

USG

Planned Start:

15/16

Multi-Year:

Yes

Project Owner:

USG

Procurement > £50K:

Funding Source:

Core Grant

IS Admin Tab

Estimation Reference:

This project will be a multi-year project.

Estimated IS Apps Days:

14/15 – SMALL (was not started due to priority of completing STU245 SCS Online Forms project)
15/16 – SMALL
16/17 – SMALL
17/18 – SMALL

Last year this was estimated as a Small, Discretionary multi-year project and was accepted into the plan as-is.

Given the effort that was taken previously to take out the ability to manually add students then this is more likely at the low end of medium. Given the complexity of students from external, which then matriculate this would be bigger than a small and so a medium.

What information do you want to be able to add to the database?

Manual addition of students - this was previously thought not needed as every student was to be a matriculated student and so the functionality was removed. In fact non-matriculated students do need to be added for example:

From SRUC agricultural college where there is an understanding going back years that SCS will support students.
A case where a student was on an OLL course through widening participation and was in the process of getting matriculated, but needed to be seen prior to matriculation and then matriculated.
Requests from other institutions, e.g. Leeds who had a student here, who was not able to access their Leeds service, but was here in partnership with UoE research and so was agreed to be able to access the University SCS.

The current online form is for only matriculated students. How would these people request this service in future if they were not there? SCS would need to have a separate process for this. Although this is a small percentage as the numbers are increasing then this will become significant.

Two additional requirements emerged during the estimation meeting:

When administrators set someone up they can go straight onto sessions. When staff set someone up they have to go out and back in and then click on sessions for staff, so would prefer they could also go straight to sessions because this will save staff time.
Also requirement to change the default date for what staff see, to be on the day rather than the day before because this will save staff time.

Would load testing be needed?

No, as it’s built on ColdFusion 9. Note that currently an error message comes up when multiple people are on – got to click back, out and then click back in again, so it fixes itself. This may be when two people are changing the same record at the same time – SCS to take screenshots and follow up with support via unidesk as usual.

Note re duration:

This is assuming that the compliance project would be done first in 2015/16, this project would start after that were complete, and so would potentially complete in 2016/17.

Link to Proposal Suggestion Document

SCS Database Enhancements

Estimated IS Apps Days:

Small

Estimated Business Partner Days:

Small