Closure Report

Project Summary

Background

The Integrated Administration Services project sat within the ISG Change Programme, which was created to focus on how staff in ISG work together and how services are delivered, enabling everyone in ISG to play their part in taking the service forward and making it fit for the future. The ISG Change Programme is focusing on nine key themes, one of which is Working Together.

The purpose of the Working Together theme is two-fold:

• to have flexible, innovative and attractive working environments across the whole of IS, where Divisions, Teams and staff can interact and collaborate freely irrespective of their physical location
• to create flexibility in both how and where we work; and to make more effective and efficient use of our time through improved processes and business tools

The Integrated Administration Services project was part of the Working Together theme.

Scope

The scope of the project extended to administrative services provided by Directorate administration staff that used processes and forms owned solely by Information Services. The project did not look to change University wide processes or enterprise systems (e.g. those owned by Central Finance and Central HR). Nor did it include Facilities tasks such as post, store room, Project support administration tasks and other non-central admin tasks such as AV bookings, switchboard. These will be reviewed at a later date.

Business Objectives

The primary objective of the project was the launch of a well-articulated, integrated, effective and efficient administration service.  An integrated team, the Business Admin team, was launched on 27 March 2018 and since then, a number of changes have been introduced to the team’s administrative processes that will make the team more effective and efficient in the future.

Success Criteria

The Project Brief stated two success criteria:

1. The project would be viewed as successful if all of the above deliverables were achieved. Given that only one of the deliverables above has not been achieved and is work in progress, the project can be viewed as successful with respect to this criterion.
2. Ensure that the level of service being provided by the admin team is viewed as least as good, if not better than before it was integrated.

It is too early to determine whether this is the case. The team is still getting used to the new ways of working and is also not at full resource capacity, so there has been a drop in the level of service being provided, as anticipated. It is proposed that the following customer satisfaction surveys should be undertaken:

December 2018 – target of 65% customer satisfaction

March 2019 – target of 75% customer satisfaction

July 2019 – target of 85% customer satisfaction

Benefits

By implementing an integrated administration service, the following benefits are expected to be delivered:

• flexibility of admin resource to better manage workload
• removal of duplication of effort
• reduction in vulnerability of small admin cohorts
• greater flexibility for managing peaks and troughs
• efficiency gains from improved processes
• admin staff have developed their knowledge and skills base
• the rest of the University finds it easier to interface and communicate with ISG

These benefits will be measured as follows:

Analysis of Resource Usage:

N/A

Key Learning Points

Confidentiality of information on UniDesk is an issue: information in the Business Admin team’s queue can be viewed by all the University of Edinburgh’s UniDesk operators. Given that the admin team are handling personal information about absence, contractor rates and candidates for new posts, this led to additional steps in some of the processes with information needing to be submitted through SharePoint and then being manipulated once in UniDesk. The perception by some members of the team is that the new ways of working are more onerous than before, because of these extra steps.

SharePoint has proved to be a very useful tool, enabling us to create complex forms that couldn’t be created on UniDesk. This has helped to improve the quality of the data provided to the Business Admin team, reducing the amount of time spent chasing for users for accurate information.

Outstanding Issues

In addition to the outstanding deliverable and non-measurement of success described in Project Summary, there were two project milestones that have not been completed. This was due to other priorities and commitments, two project milestones have not been completed. The consultation process also identified the need for a further review of the Grade 6 job description and a potential impact on the Grade 7 job description caused by the introduction of the new IS Finance roles.

Completion of all these activities has been moved to Business As Usual.