Management Information Service
Current work
The following development tasks were prioritised at the last service board, each task is listed with
progress and current status
Development
Area
Project 1.3
Dashboard
Description
The data model underpinning the dashboards has been extended to
include Research Income using finance data from SAP. This has been a
substantial amount of work, differing departmental codes and
organisational structure between source systems complicated the laod fo
information into the data warehouse.
Status
The Research Income information is summarised at a department level
rather than an individual award or application. This limits the amount on
analysis that can be undertaken on the information.
Before the Research Income reports are released a verification of the
income figures needs to be completed in conjunction with finance and an
agreement reached on access to the data with the finance office.
HR reporting
Fee
forecasting
In cycle
application
reporting
The first phase of the model which encompasses jobs and appointment is
complete. The outstanding actions from the last service board,
incorporating a self service security model over the data and correcting
data load issues have also been completed.
The HR project team are currently developing a suite of reports over the
data within the data warehouse.
A proof of concept for fee forecasting has been completed, this will allow
the student finance office to model different fee scenarios dependent on
the outcome of the Browne review
The inclusion of previous cycle information within the application reports,
allowing comparison with previous years application figures.
On-going support and maintenance
The following is the support and maintenance work which has been completed since the last service
board. This work is not considered in the prioritisation of the service board but is required to keep
the service running and ensure existing products are still fit for purpose.
Area
Overnight
data load
Description
The existing overnight Data Load routines had elements of duplication and
repetition in them, an audit and subsequent restructuring of the routines
has been undertaken reducing the overall time to process and improving
the robustness of the data load process.
This has been a substantial portion of work but essential, the
improvements resulting will increase the amount of time available for the
Status
Ongoing
Management Information Service
overnight load of data into the Warehouse. As the number of data feeds
increases free time in the overnight schedule will become increasingly
scarce.
Student
planning
These change will be released at the end of May.
A number of enhancements, ad-hoc analysis exercises and bug fixes were
completed on the student planning cycle during the 09/10 cycle. These
included provision of more detail in reports and ad-hoc exercises to answer
departmental question on load queries.
The involvement of ITS in the day to day running of the planning model has
been substantially reduced compared to previous cycles. In response to the
student planning process review an objective was to remove ITS from the
day to day running of the plan. This has largely been achieved with the
exception of a few tasks that require intervention. This move to self
sufficiency has seen the time ITS spend on support as a proportion of total
hours spent on planning drop from 80% to 20%.