Overview

Background

The University of Edinburgh hosts start of semester 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 concentrates on 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.

This project will be split into two distinct workstreams;

IT & Library&Readiness - which will focus on all the services and related projects going on across the university that have an impact on the start of semester.

Welcome Week - which will deal with everything that needs to be set up for a successful welcome week including IT access (WIFI) and Card distribution.

This document sets out the scope and accountabilities ISG undertake in 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:

• deliver a framework to allow the monitoring of collective readiness across Information Services for the start of semester.
• will leverage and build upon service-based work already carried out over the last three 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 semester period, and showcase best practices and lessons learned for future years.
• continue to improve engagement in areas including the following, noted in the closure report from last year's project:

• Get Connected - On-site support over the international weekend and during welcome week to improve the experience for the moderate number of students who had issues connecting to eduroam.
• Card Production - Two changes will be introduced in 2024 – production software and hardware will be renewed in the Summer promising more efficient production of cards before and during arrival; the location of the pre-arrival production of cards is moving from Main Library Room 1:07 to the Library Mezzanine/Gallery, which may also serve as an overflow space during International Arrival Weekend and Welcome Week in case of need to shelter students from the outside elements.  Both changes will need to be monitored to ensure success.
• Card Distribution in Halls - In previous years it emerged that some of the cards delivered to halls were not distributed to students. In 2023, we had a nominated person in each hall who could confirm that the cards had been distributed. This will be repeated in 2024.
• Main Library Exit Gates - It would be helpful if we ensure student helpers are planned to manage the library exit gate. We will consider this when recruiting student helpers. 
• IT & Library Readiness Tracker - The SharePoint Readiness Tracker has worked very well for two years now and will again be used. This proved to be a good tool to focus discussions at local management meetings.
• Project Student Assistant  - The employment of a student to work on the project was very successful. We were particularly lucky in the two previous years that our interns have been fantastic and made a real contribution to the social media strategy, and offering a valuable voice to the experiential aspects of Welcome Week.  For the first time in 2023, the student Assistant led the Principal's visit. This should be reported this year. We have been given the go-ahead to offer last year's candidate Portia Brugger the position again and have also recruited a second excellent candidate. 
• Experiential and Giveaways - Our apple and tote bag giveaways are very popular. This year we have procured a new tote bag which at 10 oz is bigger than we have given away in previous years. The bag design will be the same as in 2023. We will review our other giveaways, some valuable lessons were learned last year for example, the prize for completing the scavenger hunt was a Rory coo. This was a high-value prize and we identified that some students were simply skipping through the questions to get the complete message to pick up a prize. This year we propose to have a minimum pass mark before receiving a prize. 
• Project Organisation - The core project team has been working together for several years now, this is noticeable in how well colleagues from across various areas in ISG work seamlessly together. If possible, this should be continued in 2024. 
• Student Helpers - Every year we have a collection of amazing students during welcome week. It is recommended to recruit and deploy additional helpers next year so that during International Welcome Weekend we have more helpers available. 
• International Welcome Weekend - We will build on the success of last year's experience and include a piper and an experiential desk on both days over this weekend. 
• Floor Planning - It was commented that the handover from the previous year was inadequate. This can be attributed to staff changes and staff unavailability. One result was the comms issues and follow up this year leading to some late requests for stalls which were problematic to fulfil.
• Bank Letters - A decision was made quite late in planning last year not to print bank letters but to ensure that all areas across the university were all giving the same information out. This will be repeated in 2024.
• Welcome eMails: The wording on the ISG Welcome eMail is out of date and needs to be refreshed.  This will be addressed along with a review of all comms that the University sends to new students.
• Other lessons learned not listed above, are documented here: ISG023 Project Feedback (EASE Login required).

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).
• Improvements technical or non-technical to the Student Photo Upload.
• This project does not take on the project delivery responsibilities of any of the projects identified within the IT Readiness workstream. These remain with the assigned project managers.

Objectives and Deliverables

As this project is split into two distinct workstreams the objectives have been separated  and fall into the following workstreams:

Objective 1 - IT Service Readiness 

Objective 2 - Welcome Week 

Objective 3 - Both 

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 semester 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 and 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 semester activities and services, and their availability.
• improvement in overall satisfaction score.

Project Milestones