What can we do that would really help?

It's been a frustrating few weeks with people unable to get to meetings and too many scheduled meetings at odd times of the day! One interesting meeting Sam and I had was with the Corporate information team in charge of THESIS. The good news was that the information we want is stored in Thesis and it's relatively easy to get out. The bad news is that the information isn't put into the system until after it's been through validation.

I can see why administrative staff don't want to enter information into the system if it's going to need to be edited later and would rather wait until it's signed off. But you can change the information in Thesis (well most of it) and I wondered if it would actually save them time in the long run if it means updated documents can be easily run-off? I think the only way to find out is to have a go.

I have a meeting with some people from the AMD faculty in a couple of weeks and wonder if it may be worth asking them to work with us on this? It may mean quite a lot of work for us as we would have to run the system alongside their normal processes and we couldn't expect them to do it on their own. If this works it will be brilliant and with a shift in working practices around the university could make life so much easier for the people who have to actually collate all the validation materials.

The other courses we have targeted haven't replied yet so I may send them a gentle reminder this afternoon and see if we can get them on board.

Next week we have a DIVAS team meeting and Christa, our new team member will be joining us properly for the first time. Christa will be looking at building models based around good practice for the project.

The interim report for the project for JISC is due and I've made a start on it. As it's due in by Dec I may have to get a move on!