IT Services Newsletter Number 2

Two thirds of the way through the first 90 days

So far I've been able to meet one-to-one with 36 people in the IT Services team, with further meetings scheduled in the next month. I've also been meeting and listening to a number of our customers too. From an internal perspective, this has been an opportunity to learn more about the current organizational culture (the way we do things round here) and the variety of tasks that we undertake both individually but more often as part of a wider team - that's within IT Services but also within LSS as well as with others (e.g. Estates and Facilities). We have a vast amount of organizational knowledge and skills stretching back over 30 years in some instances which is a tremendous asset to the University. Some people have talked to me about how the interfaces between our current internal teams are disconnected at times rather than enabling. Some have concerns about policies, procedures and documentation. There are lots of initiatives and ideas that have been discussed. From an external perspective there is a willingness to collaborate and work with the IT Service, and a desire for us to be proactive in the way we manage problems and requests. There is often praise for individuals who have dealt with specific requests and I have tried to pass those on directly because this sort of positive feedback doesn't always get fed back.

Pre-Enrolment and Registration Success

OK so some of you may be thinking: how can some of the issues we heard about during intake week enable this to be labeled a success? There were system performance problems and a decision was taken to take down the pre-enrolment portal. We also encountered many password changes through pre-enrolment (over 500 recorded when I last asked) which were dealt with prior to student arrival by colleagues in the Learner Support Centre and latterly by the ICT Service Desk. This meant however, that all this pain was out of the way by the time students began lectures and accessing services for learning and so far there has been positive feedback about the smoothness of the overall process from many quarters. My own view is that we should encourage innovation and be aware that this may increase risks. We must try and mitigate and minimize those risks and with hindsight we could have done more about this. We will learn some lessons about the process we went through which means it will be even better next time. That is the essence of continuous improvement. Around two thirds of our new students chose to pre-enrol before arrival and those students had a much smoother experience than in previous years. Here is an update that was circulated by Tim Squire-Watt the SAINT Team Leader on the 24th September:
Following a recent conversation with Student Administration and Support (SAS) and Hub staff, I am pleased to announce that on balance, enrolment has been a successful event this year. All the students who have arrived have now been enrolled and apart from a few who need to complete IT self registration, these new University of Bradford students now have their corresponding email and IT accounts.
Re-enrolmentStudents are continuing to re-enrol successfully via e:Vision. The vast majority of undergraduate have now re-enrolled with some students who are still making decisions on transfers have yet to complete the process (around 350 students).
Student Loan CompanyAll home undergraduate students who have successfully enrolled or re-enrolled who have a completed applicant for financial support in place have now had their attendance confirmed and the majority, due to the UK banking sector's new 'faster payments' scheme have now received their first installment of their maintenance loan and/or HE grant payment.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the registration and intake processes - the ICT Support team who set up and took down the equipment in the Great and Small Halls, the staff who manned the service points at evenings and over the weekend, the systems team who worked to resolve the performance issues to a satisfactory conclusion and those who contributed in a range of other ways to ensure that registrations happened, documentation was available, student payments were made, invoices were raised, and passwords were sorted out.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued every week. We have discussed a number of issues including challenges with making this year’s student HESA return, corporate mobile phone strategy, video conferencing strategy, Management Information to support Research, funding for network infrastructure upgrades, proposals to tackle email/meeting maker synchronization with mobile devices, SAINT system performance issues and Rae has assisted with proactive communication with senior management. There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

Recognising exceptional performance

In the LSS Newsletter Sara congratulated a number of Learner Support Services staff who were successful in gaining an award in the recent Performance Recognition exercise. Awards take the form of a pay increment or one-off lump sum, and are offered in recognition of exceptional performance. There were a number of people in the IT Services team who received awards in recognition of work in the last year so congratulations to all of them

IT Services - Office Relocations

We have made significant progress on the planned relocation of IT Services staff from Richmond Building to JBP building. Paula Burnett and Susan Schmassmann moved on the 18th September and all of the remaining members of the MIS team will be moving week commencing October 6th which is about two months sooner than we had hoped when the first of these newsletters was circulated. It means that some student facilities are being relocated and moved to accommodate staff, but this should not impact student experience. There will be a short transition period and the move has been hastened by the relocation of the PVCs and others from D Floor into the Richmond Building E Floor offices while refurbishing work is completed on D Floor. Thanks to Sujit Brar for co-ordinating, Pat and the LSS admin team for facilitating and those who have helped to relocate and move equipment etc. It will really help communications and build relationships when we have all the IT Services team together for the first time.

Some other bits of news in the last month

The communications link between the School of Management and JBP Building has been upgraded which will improve resilience and this has been funded by YHMAN. There is more work to do up to Christmas and this will enable a major improvement in service.

The Network team has reduced equipment maintenance costs by about £16k per annum. The major contributor towards this saving is that we no longer subscribe to hardware maintenance contracts for the new core network equipment; instead we are keeping hot spares for the equipment in-house (equipment has lifetime warranty). Other contributors are re-negotiating the annual rental on the School of Management/city campus data link (saving of about £4K per annum).

Owing to the changes inherent in upgrading the Accommodation management systems (Room Service), the software which translates invoice and credit note transactions from Room Service to the Finance system Powersolve had to be rewritten. The initial, bulk run completed successfully at the start of the year — invoices to the approximate value of £577k being loaded to the Finance system. The rewritten application is Oracle based, and performed both correctly and quickly: transactions were extracted from RoomService and installed in Powersolve with a considerable time-saving over the older, Microsoft-based, application.

Newcastle University Visit

Last Friday (the day after Greenwich) was a day trip to Newcastle University during freshers week including a full campus tour. Things we liked: the posh student restaurant, the brand new sports facilities (top class), the quadrangle, the Library (apparently charter marked and it shows), the student computers in the library. Things we didn't like: the building site next to the main self catered Halls (its going to be a noisy year), the building and old school facilities that house the English Faculty (although it will relocate in the next few years), the emphasis on booze, the priority investment in Health, Medicine,Dentistry. I think we felt that it will be a grand place when its finished (£200M investment programme in next 5 years) but you may not want to be part of the building site while it gets there?

Its been a busy week.....

No update to this for 7 days must mean that it has been a REALLY busy week absolutely no time to sit and reflect. Last Thursday was a Shere Khan event hosted at the University of Greenwich and we discussed a range of "hot issues" of the day. There is a shere khan facebook group and just to prove that it wasn't all work work work we had a brief tour of the Greenwich observatory at lunchtime. Here is a picture of the new Greenwich University campus - a world heritage site no less. The top issues have been posted in anonymised form to the UCISA top issues co-ordinator but they looked something like this:

Issue: Role Analysis and reward structures

Post HERA (and HAYS) continue to reverberate with some Universities still unable to deal with how IT And Technical staff are appropriately graded and rewarded - systems like HERA continue to be time consuming, opaque and not helpful in terms of our professional skills.

Issue: Introducing Service Management Best Practice

Best Practice service management frameworks (e.g. ITIL) appear to provide a suitable approach in Higher Education to professionalise existing services but there are issues around culture change in technical areas and issues around appropriate external consultancy to support our needs. This is a slow burner which could have long term impact not a quick fix.

Issue: Virtualisation of servers and desktop with new computer rooms

There is pressure on space and also on energy use with many new computer rooms and "data centres" on the drawing board. Consultancy expertise is sparce. We are being driven to virtualization for a number of good reasons and there are significant opportunities but we may be building new spaces that do not reflect the changing dynamics.

Issue: IT Strategies

Do we still need IT Strategies in detail or are we now looking at brief summary statements. How do we engage the senior management in developing and committing to the strategy and investment going forward. A good example is student and staff email - are we moving towards a generic HE strategy (outsource student email for example) and does this mean we could more easily share generic strategies.

Issue: Outsourcing or Technology Partnering

Are we still doing things that we could effectively partner or outsource and how do we identify these opportunities and exploit them

Issue: Twenty Four Seven

What staff contractual and reward arrangements need to be in place to deliver extended service hours that deliver student and staff expectations which continue to increase. Impact also on our third party providers when contracts are modified to reflect same agenda.

Issue: Organisational Change and Change Management

What kind of organizational structure and culture is now appropriate in the HE context and how different is this from current structure (if at all) and how do we address and deliver the change. Focus is also on our stakeholders as Directors and Heads of Service and the need for us to professionalise and build sustainable relationships within the Senior Management Teams.

Issue: Green and Sustainable IT

How do we deal with many of the operational issues in this area such as effective and sustainable equipment disposal, leasing versus buying especially of desktop and issues around data portability and security (on USBs versus paper)

Student Registration 2008 an update

In some respects today has been a little less stressful and we now appear to have got to the root cause of the problems yesterday. Here is the message sent Tuesday evening:

We believe that the remedial action that took place last night has improved performance during the day today. Our supplier diagnosed the "pre-enrolment portal" as the main underlying reason for the performance issues. With agreement of Student Administration that facility was switched off mid-morning and the fallback system has been working to enrol students. Therefore we appear to have resolved the immediate problems.

You may be interested to know that 664 students were enrolled today (16 PGR, 212 PGT and 435 UG). The majority of our students had taken the opportunity to pre-enrol representing over 70% (2300 students) of the expected intake across UG/PG.

I am grateful to various colleagues for their responsiveness in particular Sue Gregson, Philip Briggs and Geoff Bell in IT Services. By the start of next week we aim to have an agreed timetable for the full upgrade of the system to new hardware later in the year.

Student Registration 2008

We had some critical problems with our student system yesterday. Here is the message that went out to various people on Monday evening.

I am sorry that there have been performance problems with the SAINT system at a critical time of year. IT Services is very aware of the urgent nature of the problems and there is a plan of action to respond to these recent events.

Very briefly the system performed well over clearing "under pressure" (apart from one blip on the Monday) but has encountered several problems with poor system performance over recent days, requiring the system to be stopped and re-started. There have been some business changes since last year (e.g. relating to the sophistication of the HESA return and the use of online pre-enrolment by new students). None of us expected this to have a significant impact on performance based on our experience last year - when the system as it is currently configured performed OK.

When I went to the Registration Hall at 14:00 and again at 17:15 today I was advised by Simon Croll and Nick Buck that the morning had been really difficult but performance had been satisfactory since lunchtime today and students had been successfully processed.

My understanding is that our recent volume of business has simply pushed the system to its limit and in particular that the system memory has been at capacity (100% use at times). I believe that this evening at 17:15 more memory was added as an immediate remedial action - this course of action had been agreed with colleagues towards the end of last week.

It may be helpful to know that a significant computer equipment upgrade has already been purchased and delivered physically to the University. It is awaiting set up by the University and its supplier (Tribal) - it hasn't been done already because there has been an agreed embargo imposed on any changes to network and system hardware in relation to SAINT since degree congregations, through clearing, pre-enrolment and now enrolment. It has become clear that this upgrade cannot wait and must be brought forward accepting that this will result in some further downtime and, as with any change, it may also introduce other unexpected consequences. Of course we would fully expect it to resolve the current performance problems and it will also improve resilience.

If you feel it appropriate, please forward this message (or relevant parts) to any colleague who may have been involved in the original circulations. We will provide an update on the timescales to follow when I have consulted others in IT Services and the SAINT Team.

Astronauts visit Bradford

Its not every day you get to meet and talk to a whole bunch of primary and secondary school headteachers - oh and two astronauts that just visited the NASA Space Station! Mike Fossum and Aki Hoshide were introduced to a small gathering at the University this afternoon having entertained over 3000 primary school pupils at Valley Parade in the morning. They told some simple and fascinating stories about how they became astronauts, how they were inspired and how they both overcame significant obstacles to achieve their true ambitions to fly in space. They were such ordinary joes with extra-ordinary lives. Mike came from a very poor background and didn't do great at school but inspired by his father went on to complete two master degrees and get full marks on his graduation before joining the space agency as an engineer. He failed to get a mission five times before succeeding. A case of reach for the stars. Shame that more people couldn't have known about it and been involved at the University. There was a video camera so maybe this will be youtubed.

First Year Experience (FYE) event

Earlier this week there was a first year experienc event co-ordinated by colleagues in the Learner Development Unit. A reasonable turn out although few practicing academics - there were more student sabbaticals than lecturers, and more people from LSS than student sabatticals. Interesting. A thought provoking presentation of some evidence at Nottingham Trent University on student expectations and experiences in their first year of study and equally interesting round table discussions on this during the afternoon. I find this personnaly relevant because Megan should be a first year student next year. Reflecting on whether cooking, laundry and shopping will be as important as the academic experience?

Follow up article in Times Higher: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403454&c=2

and another added 13/9: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403504&c=1

Educause alternative view - is this even more contemporary?

Google and Leeds Met

An example of a "contemporary" IT strategy? This article appeared in CIO magazine this month. In the same month an article in Educause monthly described an alternative strategy for provision of e-mail services for students.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum

Also from University Business Issue 9 Sept 2008.

Wireless Access (Aberdeen University)

This article was in "University Business" Issue 9 Sept 2008.

Learning and Teaching Conference

The last two days has included a lively learning and teaching conference at the Norcroft Conference Centre with reps from across the academic, admin and support services. The University is begining to consider and shape the L&T strategy for the next period in an era when competition for students will continue to increase, demographics will change and successful Universities will continue to differentiate by being distinctive. So what makes Bradford's L&T distinctive? Lots of areas were considered on the first day under the broad headings of:
Academic Framework
Enterprise, Employability and Entrepreneurship (E3
Assessment and Feedback
Inclusive Education
Education for Sustainable Development
E-Learning
Enhancing student perfomance in different ethnic groups
There are full notes available from the final "World Cafe" session. I was unable to attend day one so they are a little cryptic but pulled out the following that have a potential interest for IT services (not in order or comprehensive)

We need to address timetabling
Timetable management and student tracking are key points
Encourage entrepreneurial practice at IT
Embed IT flexible - non-prescriptive, help staff to do so
"Outduction project" - how to develop final year experiences
Availability of results on e-vision (student system)
Making information more accessible e.g. adjustments needed
Access 24/7
Support learner choice of technology and communication preferences
Need for IT support 24/7 - learners
Free and Open Source Software - view that this is better technology, free to use and cheap to develop
"Pebble Pad" effect - University buys expensive software and decides it is THE way forward - not actually true
Online groups e.g. DevelopMe break down barriers

Plenty of stuff on the L&T agenda which has an IT implication.

Plans for next year

In the process of meeting lots of people one-to-one and listening to current issues, personal agendas, general suggestions and improvements and changes that could be made. We are also about to enter the annual "planning" process. There is just over a month before this year's initial submission has to be made. Using this post to encourage any obvious (or not so obvious) things that should be discussed and considered in the coming month either direct or via comment. These could also influence current as well as longer term plans. Just trying this as another way to obtain as much feedback as possible.