July 27, 2015, by Ryan Neal
Meet the Admissions workstream
Welcome to the first post in our new blog series entitled ‘Meet the workstream’. In each of these posts we will focus on a different workstream belonging to the larger Project Transform Process Design team, of which there are five – Admissions, CRM, Student Records, Student Finance and iHub. You’ll learn a bit about who the team are and precisely what kinds of tasks and processes they are working on. We hope that this will help to increase your understanding of Project Transform and the sheer scope of tasks that lie ahead of us. This week we will be meeting the Admissions team, whose work will form a large part of GoLive 2 in September.
1. Which workstream are you?
Admissions
2. Who are the members of your workstream?
Karen Kerr – Team Leader/Senior Business Analyst
Rachel Gillam – Workstream Specialist
Nicola Rossall – Workstream Specialist
Indy Shergill – Ciber Functional Lead
Rajat Sharma – Ciber Functional Lead
David Gent – Oracle Functional Lead
Garry Bell – Data Migration Consultant
With valuable support from:
Penny Nichols – Undergraduate Admissions Manager
Laura Muirhead – Undergraduate Admissions Manager
Dave Feeley – Undergraduate Admissions Manager
Jo Wesley – Undergraduate Admissions Officer
3. Which processes does your workstream cover?
Applications, admissions and visa support. For GoLive 2 we will be focusing on UK undergraduate admissions received through UCAS; for GoLive 3 we will expand to cover all international admissions.
4. Which areas of the University will be impacted by your work?
GoLive 2 will affect every School and Faculty throughout the University as well as the International Office and the Admissions Office. GoLive 3 will impact Information Services, Academic Services, Student Services, the Finance Department and the Graduate School.
5. What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment we’re detailing the new processes that will be supported by the release of GoLive 2. This involves identifying the system functionality required and determining the way in which applicants will interact with the University.
6. What are some of the main challenges that your team are facing and how are you overcoming these?
The main challenge for us is in selecting the functionalities that we want to turn on during GoLive 2, and those that will follow later in the year, or with GoLive 3. The system that we have is very powerful, so we need to be selective and deliver a significant improvement without overloading users with new information and functionalities. There’s also a challenge around dependencies here – we need to make sure that we’ve got the core functions in place for GoLive 2 in order to support the ones that we will add at a later date. It’s about limiting ourselves to what we should do rather than getting carried away and implementing too much. We’ve been working with the Admissions Office in order to identify key functionalities.
7. What will you be delivering as a result of your work?
Our next key deliverable will be the GoLive 2 solution! We will be configuring the system in time for the September launch, which involves identifying the functionalities that will be included in GoLive 2, and those that can be trickled in after the launch.
8. What’s in store for you for GoLive 3?
Essentially the same as GoLive 2, but on a much larger scale! We will need to coordinate all the international campuses into one way of working, which will present a challenge around language and legislation. On the other hand we get to see the full potential of the system and deliver some real efficiencies to the admissions process.
There you have the Admissions workstream! Let us know if you found this blog post helpful and if there’s anything more you’d like to see added for future editions of ‘Meet the Workstream’. You can subscribe to the Project Transform blog to avoid missing out on updates.
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