Start of term is an increasingly challenging time for students and our IT and Library services. Our services are more complex and tightly integrated. Student numbers are increasing and expectations are growing. Its important that the University provides a professional and positive experience for out students, particularly new first year undergraduates. Staff turnover from year to year can mean that key expertise is lost. This is all too important to leave to chance.

This project provides a project based framework for monitoring our services, project and people readiness for start of term providing early warning of possible problems and time to respond.

Following on from the successful Start of Term project completed last year, we will again use a project approach to ensure the readiness of our projects, services and people for the start of term.

The framework delivered by this project will enable us to monitor our collective readiness for start of term and *does not* replace the very good work already being done within the ISG Divisions and across the University on start of term activities.

This outputs from this project will include:

• Confirmation and visibility of the staff responsible for start of term readiness in each ISG Division 
• Visibility of the projects delivering services needed for the start of term and their delivery RAG status 
• Visibility of the IT and Library Business Services needed for the start of term (based on the Service Catalogue) and their readiness RAG status
• Visibility of the people needed to deliver support services over the start of term period, including out of hours support, and their readiness RAG status 
• Processes for reviewing readiness of  services, projects and people at least fortnightly during the period June to October 2018

This project is starting in May 2018 and will cover all the period from the start of teaching in July (some areas only), the formal start of the academic year on 1st August, Welcome Week starting 8th September, Teaching Week 1 starting 17th September and Teaching Week 2 starting 24th September.

This project will provide an invaluable framework for ensuring a successful start of term as well as values information and lessons learned for future years.