Information Management Project

Setting Target Student Numbers

Evaluation and analysis have identified management of target student numbers as a significant area for improvement. This will be the first improvement theme that will be progressed by the Information Management Project.

Current issues are:

• Meetings with Faculties have identified that although Schools and Faculties are involved in the process of setting target student numbers there is a lack of clarity on how the numbers provided contribute to funding allocations.
• There is a significant amount of manual effort in maintaining the current data collection and undergraduate forecasting model spreadsheets.
• The target student numbers collected are retained in numerous spreadsheets which doesn't allow for easy access or visibility of the information by all stakeholders.
• To report on target student numbers against actual enrolments and do session comparisons is only possible with significant manual effort due to lack of integration of spreadsheet data with data held in the SITS student record system.
• The procedure for agreeing, authorising and changing target student numbers doesn't appear to be clear to all stakeholders.
• Calculation of FTEs, Serviced FTEs and projected income from the target student numbers is complicated by the quality and availability of underlying data relating to student load and fees.

The Information Management Project aims to make improvements in this area by providing an opportunity to consider the overall business process relating to setting of target student numbers and making these targets available so that they can inform business decision making. To provide much needed visibility on agreed target numbers across all areas and to make this data available it is essential that these are written to a central database. It is likely that this will require the development of a web application to facilitate data collection and this will be confirmed once the detailed requirements have been agreed.

In addition, this development should seek to meet the requirements of Financial Services with regard to forecasting of tuition fees and the initial development should aim to provide the data that is currently provided from Student Statistics and Financial Services for use in the Resource Allocation Model (RAM).

This will deal with the issues identified in the following ways:

• There will be one place for entry of projected/target student numbers and there will no longer be a requirement for schools to complete the existing 7 data collection tables.
• There will be a significant time saving in not having to manually populate the data collection tables with data from SITS for use by Schools in entering projections.
• There will be visibility on the financial impact of setting target numbers.
• There will be an opportunity to investigate automating calculation of target numbers of continuing students based on information already existing in SITS.
• An agreed central repository for course, fee and module information will be established possibly by improved usage of an existing repository, such as SITS, this will help with automation and consistency.
• The business process relating to the area will be reviewed and agreed along with related business rules and definitions for all the data items involved in this process
• The data collected in this system will be made available in a data warehouse to allow for reporting and analysis and to ensure that the data is available, visible and understandable University wide.

A Working Group has been set-up to inform and direct this Improvement Theme.