Project Name: SharePoint

Lead Institution: University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)

Project Lead: Lucy Nelson

 

Sharepoint: To use EA approaches to monitor the impact of the newly implemented document management solution and to identify how the new ICT infrastructure can be utilised most effectively to meet the business need: reduced printing costs etc. 

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Background

 

Aims and objectives

 

The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) introduced SharePoint with an expectation that it could facilitate improvements in several areas namely; business processes, documentation management, collaboration and communication .

 

This project aimed to demonstrate the benefits of ensuring processes were correctly established on Sharepoint through working with people across the business area in their design. The aim was to ensure the system was built based upon the business needs and not driven by the application of the technology. 

 

The project aimed to use service design to facilitate process reviews of:

 

• Annual monitoring of full time undergraduate Courses
• Meeting management within schools and services
• Exploring potential for improvements to communication within schools and services

 

Context

 

UCLan reviewed and updated it's communication software offering by introducing the new systems, SharePoint, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Lync. These systems were introduced to replace the existing e-mail system and provide staff and students with access to software used in many other organisations across the world. Internally, it was hoped that the suite of systems would enhance collaboration between departments, improve efficiency, increase the quality of documentation and information management and improve internal communications.

 

It was recogniosed that, like many organisations, UCLan had a mass of information circulating within the business. Documents and versions of documents, meeting papers, plans and support documents. This information was held in many places; shared network areas, within the Virtual Learning Environment ( VLE), in printed form in traditional filing systems, in e-mails and e-mail attachments. 

 

This caused many issues such as:

 

• difficulty in finding information
• difficulty in finding the correct or latest information
• Loss of confidence in information quality
• lack of version control and duplicated or many copies in circulation
• lack of audit trails
• mis-information
• inefficiency and frustration

  

As with other universities, UCLan were seeking to balance a number of priorities including cost reduction and sustainability. Other work was looking at  reducing printing costs through a number of initiatives, including paperless meetings. Effectice communication was also a priority. Several channels were utilised for communication both across the institution, within service or schools areas and to identified cross function groups, email was the most highly used but some information was provided through notices on plasma screens or through the staff intranet and through staff m,eetings at several levels. Sometimes key information was missed.

 

To attempt to tackle this UCLan  introduced SharePoint as a tool for documentation management, collaborative working space and communication. It was anticipated that the introduction of SharePoint would improve efficiency with accessing and sharing documents, reduce printing costs with the introduction of paperless meetings and improve targeted communication at all levels across the university. 

 

The business case

 

Staff were sceptical about the introduction of a new ICT system, and felt it could have a negative impact on their day to day work.  However, with the need to share  information across the university increasing, there had been an increase in the number of processes that were being supported electronically. It was recognised that it would be vital to ensure that business processes were effective and efficient and therefore essential to ensure process development was business led. It was also apparent that although adaptations may need to be made due to cost or feasibility of electronic systems, the capability or especially the assumed capability should not influence the initial development of the most efficient business process.  

 

There was a possibility that the new SharePoint system would somehow address issues with business processes, when actually the same issues would continue on SharePoint if the process itself was not reviewed.

 

This project would act as an exemplar for the transfer of processes to SharePoint, demonstrating the benefits of undertaking a business led process review to address issues with processes prior to moving them to SharePoint.  In addition the project would take a collaborative approach, involving stakeholders from all aspects of the business process so they can develop the ideal process as a collective, understanding how their role impacts on others.

 

Key drivers

The key drivers were:

 

• To increase staff confidence in using ICT to facilitate business processes
• To introduce more effective documentation management
• To demonstrate the benefits of business led, collaborative process reviews to increase effectiveness and efficiency of business processes

 

JISC resources/technology used

 

Archi was used to map the current and potential business processes for documentation management and meeting management. The tool was useful to model the discussions and start to think about Enterprise Architecture but in this part of the work, it's modelling qualities were of most value in reflecting back the discussions of the groups to ensure understanding was common across the project team. Once potential ("to be") processes were identified the ICT systems and services at UCLan were reviewed to establish how the business needs could be met. In addition, The service design resources were used to review and redesign the internal communication service within UCLan, establishing a blueprint of the current system from a user perspective, identifying touch, fail and excessive wait points and helping to inform the future development of SharePoint as a full intranet facility. The fail and excessive wait was prioritised and a review of the available ICT infrastructure will be undertaken in the future as more areas embrace ShaprePoint and business process reviews .

 

Outcomes

 

The project identified the need to align the annual monitoring process, an internal quality process that looks at each element of a study module for each course, with Periodic Course Review (PCR), a formal quality process which occurs at a School level every 5-6 years.  These are key areas for the University and due to the complexities of the internal communications from both a political and process perspective it was agreed to focus on Annual Monitoring, PCR and Meeting management as deliverable solutions could be produced for these within the time frames of the project. 

 

Annual Monitoring

 

The use of the Service Design approach worked well to establish the current processes and issues.  Three workshops were held for a mixture of staff involved in this area and they seemed eager to engage in attending the events and having input into the project. Changes to the annual monitoring process were very important to them as they were the staff who would be impacted at an operational level .  The “As Is” along with issues was captured through these workshops and documented by the business analysts.  From this,  a new'to be' process was developed.  This process was then presented to the developers in the digital shift team who worked with the Academic Quality and Standards Unit (AQaSU), who would be the final owners of the process to develop it.

 

Periodic Course Review (PCR)

 

It was soon clear that the PCR process needed to be developed and aligned with the Annual Monitoring Process as both processes shared the same documentation.  It was agreed that the process would be developed in two stages.  The first stage was the creation of the Annual Monitoring and PCR locations on SharePoint which were to be held in the document library. the second stage would be to include the full PCR process. As both processes are owned by AQaSU, the workspaces on SharePoint would  live within the AQaSU site.

 

Achievements

 

The new annual monitoring process has been rolled out for this cycle of annual monitoring.  In addition there is a new Unified Communication and Collaboration policy / guidance document currently being formalised, ready to present to the Senior Management Team.  This policy outlines the expectations of staff with regards to communication and collaboration, including the requirement for all staff to use the Outlook calendar to ensure the most efficient approach to meeting management can be used. In addition, the Schools are about to embark on Period Course Review using SharePoint for the first time.  The true benefits of the facilitation of both of these processes on SharePoint will not be fully realised until the annual monitoring process has been through several cycles prior to PCR.  However, the challenges of providing the documentation for the first rounds of PCR can be used to highlight to Schools the long term intended benefits of facilitating the annual monitoring processes on SharePoint.

 

Benefits

 

The system follows the principle of having a single source of information as championed in the Business Upgrade project.  As a result, if the process is engaged with correctly, there should only be one version of course documentation, stored in a central location that will enable it to be used across the required processes.  In particular, Schools who utilise the annual monitoring process effectively should find that when they reach PCR (a 5 – 6 year cycle) all the documentation they require will have been collated through the annual monitoring process saving a lot of time and effort to collect.

 

The benefits of the introduction of the meeting management guidelines should result in significant improvements to the ease of organising meetings, saving a significant amount of staff time. In addition, the introduction of the new policy will support staff in the use of the new process.  The project also highlighted the benefits of engaging staff who will be involved in the operation of the processes in their review and design. 

 

Drawbacks

 

The owners of the process have taken a softer approach to the introduction of facilitating the processes on SharePoint, and have therefore not realised the full potential benefits of the process such as including workflows to facilitate Dean’s approval of documents.  However, this approach may beneficial in the long run to manage the change process, implementing change steadily rather than imposing a complete change all at once.

 

There are still manual interventions required, for example, the documents will need to be moved between the Annual Monitoring and PCR libraries manually.  However, this decision was taken as there is a university wide documentation management review being undertaken and the project felt there would be little or no value in introducing a document management approach for this project, which would have to be changed once the overarching approach was introduced.  Therefore, it was left as a manual process until the new approach was agreed.

 

There is also a potential access issue to the SharePoint sites for people external to the University.  The PCR process involves external people in the process,  usually academics from other universities.  Due to the move to facilitate many of the university processes on SharePoint, it has been noted that there will be an increase in the number of external people who will be given UCLan usernames and IDs in order to use the system – a potential security concern.

 

One challenge the project faced was the discovery that Microsoft announced the withdrawal of meeting workspaces in SharePoint 2013.  UCLan is using SharePoint 2010, which features meeting workspaces.  Meeting workspaces are used to facilitate meetings at UCLan and were included as part of the new process this project developed.  This encouraged discussion about the reliance on technology, particularly when facilitating business processes that are used once during the academic year such as annual monitoring.  In addition, the team who support the technical and development aspects of SharePoint have noted that during the migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, processes that went beyond out of the box functionality such as those that required additional coding to be developed internally, faced significant issues when migrating to 2010 and in some cases it was not possible to migrate these processes.

 

The benefits of using SharePoint to facilitated the business processes has been identified, however UCLan is conscious that having to redevelop the business processes each upgrade would not only be a waste of resources but also confusing for those using the business process.  Therefore the decision has been made to develop all process using out of the box functionality and potentially, where required use SharePoint designer when out of the box functionality is required.  There would have to be a significant business case for bespoke development to be undertaken.

 

The withdrawal of the meeting workspaces, although inconvenient, does not affect the principles of the policy that has been developed and the SharePoint team have advised that they can create a similar, out of the box solution.  Some of the functionality will unfortunately be lost, such as the integration with Outlook, however many of the other intended benefits such as a single source of information for meetings, improved efficiency with accessing availability etc. will still be achieved.

 

Key lessons

 

Involving the business in the development of the process was highly beneficial.  It is interesting to observe the way requests are made to developers as they carry the assumption that the developer has final say rather than being able to advise what is possible or not.  It was also beneficial to consider the related processes, as championed through the Business Upgrade project, which resulted in the change of focus for the project from internal communication to PCR.  This will enhance the benefits of facilitating the Annual Monitoring Process on SharePoint and will align the quality assurance business processes. 

 

Looking ahead

 

UCLan is currently undertaking a project to develop UCLan’s approach to records management.  Once this is completed, the annual monitoring process will be revisited to automate the process of moving the documents from the annual monitoring process to the PCR process.  This project has also been considering how the work of the Jisc funded Course Data project can be aligned with the annual monitoring and PCR as the course documentation developed through the course approval process (facilitated on SharePoint as a result of this project) will be required for the annual monitoring and PCR processes.

 

Sustainability

 

The processes were developed with key stakeholders who either own the processes or will be engaged in them on a regular basis at an operational level.  Therefore they have been developed to meet the business need rather than adapting a process as a result of the technology. This should encourage the business to buy in and engage with the process as they have led the change.  In addition, as the project has taken a holistic view and has considered how the quality processes a course progresses through will align, the long term validity of these processes will be assured.  The challenge will be securing engagement across the business.  While representatives of stakeholder groups were involved in the service design approach, there are likely to be some who are reluctant to engage in the approaches to the projects.  However, engagement is required to be successful.  The team responsible for the quality assurance processes have highlighted this as a concern and the project will look to the project board to ensure senior strategic leadership to ensure the engagement in these processes and to work with Deans of Schools to ensure their staff engage in the processes.

 

Glossary 

AQaSU – Academic Quality and Standards Unit

EA – Enterprise Architecture

PCR – Periodic Course Review

VLE’s – Virtual Learning Environments

UCLan – University of Central Lancashire