Overview

Background

This project is a part of the Enhancing Student Support (ESS) Project. The ESS Project aims to ensure that, over the next decade and beyond, students have access to a framework of guidance and support that builds on the best of current practices, meets contemporary needs, and is of a quality and consistency appropriate to a university of high global standing.

The ESS Project was started in 12/13, the Initial ESS IT Tools Project was initiated to support the first year of the ESS Project. The timescales were tight, with new functionality needed for all students and relevant staff before the start of Semester 1. This, combined with the emerging requirements of the Personal Tutors, Senior Tutors and Student Support Officers as their roles were established, meant that only basic initial functions were able to be deployed in the timescales needed.

The Initial ESS IT Tools Project team collected suggestions for enhancing the initial tools throughout the project on this wiki page for staff and this wiki page for students.

Scope, Objectives and Deliverables

This ESS Small Enhancements Project objective is to prioritise and implement as many enhancement suggestions as can be achieved within the limited budget. It is accepted that it will not be possible to develop all of the enhancement suggestions within the budget, in which case those which will not be delivered will be moved out of scope.

The deliverables will be:

• A prioritised list of enhancement suggestions
• Updated functions delivered to LIVE for as many of those enhancement suggestions which have been prioritised as can be accommodated within the budget and timescales.

Benefits

The benefits will be improved functionality for Personal Tutors, Senior Tutors, Student Support Officers or Students, depending on which suggested enhancements are prioritised and implemented.

Success Criteria

This project will be successful if:

1. Priorities of suggested enhancements can be determined.
2. Clear requirements to enable the development and testing of the suggested enhancements can be provided ahead of the build starting (note that if requirements are not clear then development build of lower priority work whose requirements are clear may start - this may mean that higher priority enhancements are not implemented if the budget or time runs out and must be borne in mind).
3. As many prioritised suggested enhancements as can be implemented within the budget before Christmas 2012 are complete and LIVE before Christmas 2012.