Closure Report

Project Summary

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 ISG Directorate is focused on the work needed to deliver their services.

Each year the Start of Term Readiness project 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 that meets the needs of our students and staff.  This year was different to previous years as the scope also included Welcome Week in the Main Library.  This task was previously undertaken by various departments within ISG and has presented challenges in the past.

The scope of this project covered

This project aimed to:-

• deliver a framework to allow the monitoring of collective readiness across Information Services for the start of term.
• 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.
• highlight areas of potential uncertainty or hot spots in terms of resource requirements.
• 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.
• implement lesson learned from the 2018/19 project, these include:
• Improving engagement in areas
  • By 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.

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 and staff 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.

Outcomes

Overall the project was a great success. The project started earlier this year which allowed improved comms with stakeholders across the University but mainly within ISG. Including Welcome Week activities in this year's project was, at times, challenging but ultimately resulted in an improved experience for our new and returning students. We will build on this success next year, starting the project earlier with a review of our webpages a key aspect of the early work. 

The Principal visited the Main Library on Monday of week zero, this was a very successful visit in which the Principal saw at first hand the main activities. 

Click on the image below for a 90 second review of  week zero

Service Request Statistics

The tables below show statistics categorised by call type and input point recorded by User Services in the Helpdesk. 

The table below shows the call number categorised by the operator group with the escalation percentages. 

The table below shows the calls categorised according to type during week zero.

(excludes calls where caller identity was not recorded)

Quick Call Statistics

Student helpers were equipped with input devices so that they could record information about enquires. This gives us important data that we can use next year to evaluate areas that can receive more focus ahead of Welcome Week.

Analysis of Resource Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate: 50 days

Staff Usage Actual: 50 days

Key Learning Points

• The overall management and stakeholder engagement was deem to be excellent. Having a wider focus of the project had a positive impact on the student experience. This also had the desired positive impact on encouraging better engagement from areas which in the past have not been that involved in the start of term project.
• Starting the project earlier allowed more time for consultation with other areas across the University. Although this has been positive, the recommendation is that next years project starts earlier in February. 
• Next year the project needs to improve the various strands of comms during weeks 1 and 2. Comms should be more aligned across the different areas in ISG

• Although the queuing system during Welcome Week was a success, there were queues outside the Library. In the event of inclement weather this would have been an issue. Next year we should look to adjust the queuing system to take this possibility into account. 

• We can improve on clarity on deliverables at during the early stages of the project. There were some aspects that weren't clear till quite late on e.g. what services were we promoting to the new students.

• There seemed to be a lot of confusion about the role of SLT, and whether they had authority over the deliverables.

• We need to improve the content and ownership of the content on web pages. The relative content on the New Student Website is edited by the site owner, outwith ISG, however the content itself is maintained by ISG. Improvements were made to this content to ensure that we are communicating an aligned message. These pages often link out to ISG pages, this content was often out of date or not adequately student focussed. 

• There was different views on how bank letter printing was being handled, this was not clarified until shortly before students arrived. 

• The Welcome Week strand of this work was lead by head of Communications, next year this role should be picked upon by a team member in the Library or User Services. 

• There was no financial budget this year to cover costs such as tensa barriers, give-aways and experiential items. It is recommended that next year the project has a budget of £10K to cover these items.

• During closure it was noted that some students had reported issues with uploading photos. Next year's project should review the process making any relevant software changes required. 

Outstanding Issues

There are no outstanding issues