Overview

Background

University of Edinburgh hosts start of term open days for new students joining the University twice a year; September and January.  September intake amounts to ca. 10,000 new students from across the world.  Professional Services concentrate on the administrative, IT and joining activities to ensure the best experience possible.  ISG is responsible for IT Services readiness, new cards, personal IT (Wi-Fi), Library tours, as well as learning and teaching technologies.

Each directorate will be focused on their specific scope to deliver their services.

This document sets out the scope and accountabilities ISG undertake in the preparation for the new academic year. The objective is to ensure ISG has a consistent, repeatable and coordinated process in place. 

Scope

The scope of this project covers:

• will deliver a framework to allow the monitoring of collective readiness across Information Services for the start of term.
• will leverage and build upon service-based work already done including the excellent Start of Term Major Incident report that User Services Division has used over the last two years.
• will seek to highlight areas of potential uncertainty or hot spots in terms of resource requirements.
• will seek to build upon and support the excellent work already done around the start of term period, and showcase best practice and lessons learned for future years.
• Will implement lesson learned from the 2018/19 project, these include:
• Improving engagement in areas
  • Starting this year’s project earlier in order to influence a number of activities due to the necessarily long lead time on many of them - for example:
    • Estates projects which potentially impact on teaching space at the start of session.
    • Communications involving web-based or printed media.
  • Ensure the engagement with the Weekly Welcome group, by having a representative on the project team.
  • Provide improved clarity around out of hours procedures, roles and responsibilities.
  • Agree with SLT which KPIs will be measured and how these will be measured.
  • Ensure that SLT set the expectation that individuals involved can commit adequate time to attend meetings and provide two-way communication from their areas.
  • “Recommendation that clear guidance on out of hours support for the start of session is agreed at SLT level ahead of the next year’s project in order to reduce ambiguity. NB this was raised following the 17/18 project.” Has this happened?
  • Develop and agree on an improved approach with Estates to overcome the challenges of the last two years. Early engagement with the ISG Estates Programme Manager, potentially incorporating the Estates PMO in a more meaningful way.
  • Increase student involvement in the project.
  • Improve comms with welcome week activities.
  • Investigate improvements to the EUCLID/Learn feed so that updates to student details appear quicker in Learn
  • Ensure various improvements for welcome week are implemented (see Lessons Learned Report 2018/19 for more details).
  • Improved measurement on service availability.
  • Develop contingency plans to mitigate the impact on students due to infrastructure failure or attack.

Out of Scope

This project does not replace existing activities for the start of session within the ISG Divisions or across the University as a whole.

Any areas of uncertainty will be communicated via the appropriate IS Divisional representative for management within the division (or service, or project as appropriate).

Objectives and Deliverables

Benefits

• Improved visibility across ISG and the University promoting awareness of service changes and improvements.
• Improved data on the impact of previous and planned changes to assist in making better decisions during the start of term period.
• Improved student experience.
• Reduction to cost in ISG staff time resolving incidents resulting from service changes.
• Reduction in costs to IS and the University of managing Major Incidents.
• Establish maintain the start of term statistics and information which can be used for future years.

Success Criteria

Supporting the start of semester 1 with improved overall visibility of:

• the readiness of services and any expected issues.
• staff resources required to support start of term activities and services, and their availability.
• improvement in overall satisfaction score.

Project Milestones