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.
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