Celebrating Susan Fellows Retirement

The subtitle for this brief speech is from DP to ACU to MIS via MAC – which some of you will know all about.

I have asked friends and colleagues for stories and anecdotes from Susan’s career and nearly everyone has said to me that there really aren’t any stories to tell. I don’t really believe that, but I have to say that in the fifteen short years that I have been at Bradford my main memories are of someone who has been exceptionally hard working, diligent and a very supportive colleague.

But let’s go back to the beginning and retrace one or two steps along the way – and find that there are parallels with today.

Susan first joined the University as a Systems Analyst Programmer in January 1974, what was then called the “Data Processing Division of the Bursar’s Department” – it was called DP for short. Susan was appointed as one of three (the others were?) reporting to a senior Systems Analyst (John Greenwood?) and it was a time when this team did the development work and there was an Operations section whose job was to get in the way....I mean to ensure that there was information, documentation, support in order to ensure error-free running of live systems. Happy Days!

In the last month or so some of us have been attending courses on something called ITIL or service management and wondering how useful it might be to still have an operations team

One of Susan’s early accomplishments was supporting and delivering Library systems which at the time were pioneering in the University sector. As on-line facilities came into place, Susan wrote software for circulation of books (issues, returns, renewals, reader registration etc), on-line ordering for library acquisitions. Those were really ground breaking days when response times were measured - target less than 4 seconds, and transactions were carefully counted - 2000 on-line library transactions a day at the start of term.

This month LSS has just invested £300k in a new library catalogue and management system called BRADfinder.

The early ‘80s were characterised by severe financial cuts imposed by the Government on some target Universities and this resulted in a loss of development staff – leaving Susan holding the fort on her own for a while. This included supporting the University’s payroll system which was an adapted package. The financial situation had a massive impact over a long period to IT developments at Bradford

In 1985, Susan took responsibility for the first of several payroll crises when the supplier told us they would withdraw their package within three months – working over 100 hours a week as the deadline approached. Despite all the odds, Susan ensured that all staff were paid correctly from the start of the new tax year and dealt with a number of technical issues to ensure that everyone was paid.

In 1991 Susan again was instrumental in implementing the Unipay payroll system when support for this package was withdrawn, not only again managing the project as project leader, but also ensuring that the overall system was reliable, well documented, self-maintaining as far as possible and Susan was highly commended by the University senior management for all of her efforts in ensuring the success of that project

In 1992, DP became the Administrative Computer Unit or ACU under the leadership of John Town. It seems that this was a slight bumpy time for all concerned as John had many new ideas and new ways that he wanted things to be done. In some respects it was John’s tenacity that led to the new investments in IT alongside the MAC initiative – the holy grail of administrative systems in the sector.

Susan became involved in the first of those MAC systems – the undergraduate admissions system written in INGRES and leading to our first automated results day linking with UCAS replacing a manual system and motorbike and sidecar to Cheltenham.
In 1994, ACU became Management Information Services and Susan has been involved in a wide variety of new and innovative systems – there are too many to list in detail but they include:

• Beyond UG Admissions to include non UCAS Admissions and Postgraduate Admissions.
• HESA returns (electronic for the first time)
• The project to investigate the new student system – which eventually became SAINT
• Implementing the accommodation package Room Service and interfaces to the Finance system – when we had over 2000 students in our own Halls of Residence.
• Examinations management systems

In among all of this Susan also managed to complete a Part Time Degree with the Open University through Saturday lectures and correspondence courses. The Honours award was in Maths and Computing – I think it took a little more than a decade – a true lifelong learner.

Something that struck me particularly in collecting all these achievements was a brief note from Susan which said: “the best work is often done in the background and is no less creditable for that – it is management’s job to raise the profile of such hidden but vital and often challenging work”. I don’t know whether Susan feels that management has done it’s job over the years, but in my experience Susan has always set and achieved exceptionally high standards and will be missed by all of us. Congratulations on your retirement and our very best wishes for the future.