Report for August 2024

Project Info

Project Manager's Commentary

STU271 Prospective Student Web Future State

Category: Discretionary

Milestones

• Search and listings functionality (Nov 2024)
• Delivery of postgraduate taught degree profile template (TBC Dec 2024)
• Delivery of postgraduate research degree profile template (TBC Dec 2024)
• Undergraduate site build (October - February 2025)
• Undergraduate site (Entry 2026) go-live - March 2025
• Postgraduate site build (April to October 2025)
• Postgraduate site (Entry 2026) go-live - October 2025

RAG Status

GREEN

Report by Neil Allison for August 2024

Achievements this period

• Washup and retro for end of Year 2
• Contract signed for part of Year 3
• Resource booking with Manifesto for 4 sprints October to December
• UG entry requirements redesign - prototype co-design with SRA Admissions ahead of usability testing with students in September

Issues

• Contract has been signed with Manifesto for 55% of planned amount. Awaiting results of USG funding review before planning for remainder of planned work.

• Curriculum Transformation likely will require changes to programme templates, but no details of planned collaboration as yet. This is an issue for CT, however and will not impact the rollout of the new service through 2025.

Next steps

• Usability testing of prototypes with students, leading to writing of user stories ready for development restart in October
• Planning with Curriculum Transformation

STU272 Making Transitions Personal Review 24/25

Category: Discretionary

Milestones

RAG Status:

GREEN

Report by Alexandra Mezeul for August 2024

Achievements this period

• The Review Testing was successfully completed
• The Review was set to 'Live' and all links were sent to the Schools and Colleges for inclusion in the Welcome email to students on or near the 20th August.
• The original cron has been turned on for the Delivery of the Review to students and has been running without issue.
• Great communication with ITI in lead up and on the day of Delivery. Project Sponsor is included in meetings with the Start of Semester (SoS), Student Experience Project and has been relaying updates to them and vice versa. The PM has been updating the SoS Tracker as regular intervals. This new engagement and cross-communication between projects this year has been very helpful for the project team.

Issues

Resolved Issues:

• New cron merged with existing cron to amend added review of students not captured in initial bulk upload from Euclid data: https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/unpublished/project/stu272/issues/6

• There was an issue impacting some students trying to access the Review which was raised by careers and quickly investigated and resolved by the SharePoint Lead and Project Team technical leads/support. The issue was an unexpected threshold problem in SharePoint and has been removed so will no longer pose an issue for students engaging with the Review.
  • Further details here: https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/unpublished/project/stu272/issues/4
• We had to change our soft Milestone for the Review Reminder email to students from the 9th September to 11th September as Careers was notified of a University-wide communication to be sent out to all students on the 9th which we did not want to impeded on. The 11th September was decided by Careers and agreed by the Project team. All tasks in the Planner have been updated to account for the change and our Milestone Log updated.
• One of our Careers Business Leads had identified a possible area of improvement for future Reviews: they had used the dashboard to identify that some schools like ECA were not sending out the welcome emails until much later (by 9-10 days post Review Delivery) which would impact both the reminder email comms and the timeframe for some students invited to submit the Review. The Careers Lead will bring this to the business/Induction team for consideration on mitigation in future years - perhaps a change in terminology or a forced deadline to send the welcome email.

Next steps

• Send out Reminder email to the students on 11th September
• Close the Review on 27th September