Overview

Background

From the SBMS Honours Portal Website - 

"Welcome to the Biomedical Sciences Honours Project Portal. The portal has been set up to offer a wide range of Honours projects from supervisors across the Deanery to students on the Anatomy and Development, Bioethics, Law and Society, Biomedical Sciences, Health Sciences, Infectious Diseases, Medical Sciences, Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Physiology and Reproductive Biology programmes, allowing transferability of all projects across participating programmes."

The Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Honours Portal is used to allocate honours projects to students. The current solution was developed and implemented over 10 years ago, and evolving requirements have necessitated multiple workarounds including dependencies on manual tasks carried out by the Portal Administration team. The allocation process also uses an algorithm, developed in house, to apply student and supervisor preferences to allocate projects. This algorithm sits outside of the current portal, and requires an export of data ahead of running the algorithm and data maintained on spreadsheets outside of the system.

There is a technical imperative to rewrite the BMS Portal to incorporate the manual workarounds that have been built into the workflows, and to reduce the risk of data loss from regular imports, exports and edits. The underlying software is also increasingly difficult to support due to the age of the technology involved, and the framework no longer being maintained by the supplier.

The impact of the system becoming unusable would mean staff being involved in a manual allocation process, however this would not be possible with the resources available in the timeframe required. As a consequence, students would be at risk of being allocated to projects late, miss out on valuable lab experience as well as significantly damaging the reputations of MVM and the wider University.

Scope

• Development of a new BMS Honours Portal providing the existing functionality and incorporating the manual workarounds into the standard workflow
• Incorporating the allocation algorithm into the Portal
• Development of processes to record manually allocated projects (referred to as 'Off-Portal' projects) such as individual allocations agreed between student and supervisor, as well as group projects
• Development of an extensible solution to allow future use of portal by other schools
• Development of reports from the portal

Out of scope

• Changes to the allocation algorithm
• Procurement of a replacement solution
• Development of functionality, or onboarding, of any other school into the portal within MVM155

Objectives and Deliverables

Benefits

Success Criteria

• New BMS Honours Portal launched
• Staff training delivered
• Students can be allocated to projects
• Students can use the portal
• Less manual steps in overall process due to new portal functionality

Project Milestones

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