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Ms. P is the faculty board secretary and administrator for classics. She manages all administrative staff and IT people, makes sure staff know what their roles are, the day to day management of the building and the faculty budget. She also has an additional role for the whole division helping with research applications - mainly costing.
Ms. P says that dealing with research applications takes up a lot of her time. Staff approach her with their requirements for a research project she has to advise on costs and costs for faculty. She uses Resolve to generate this. Ms. P considers Resolve to be quite user friendly but there have been some problems with the move to full economic costing which has “made things a lot more complicated” - Resolve does not have enough options to cope with this. In general though it makes life a lot more easier. She largely communicates with staff via e-mail, sending back-and-forth the proposals as word processing documents until the proposal is finite then she signs a paper copy. However, Ms. P says that the research councils are moving to an electronic submission procedure using a system called Je-s (https://je-s.rcuk.ac.uk/) which “will make life a lot easier as at the moment it is very time consuming getting the bits of paper all available to sign”. The new system will give her editing rights for her divisions applications, when someone submits a proposal it will come to her, she will do a final check. When she submits the application will go to Research Services, when the applicant submits it will go to the funding body.
Ms. P is also involved in the recruitment of staff. This involves the drawing-up of the job spec, getting them approved, advertising he post, receiving and distributing applications to the interview panel, and communication with applicants. Then when an applicant is accepted the drawing up of the contract, Communication involving recruitment is largely dealt with by e-mail and the job spec is e-mailed to the university offices to put on the central website.
When budgeting and monitoring the faculty finances the dept. still largely use an excel spreadsheet rather than OSIRIS as they find it hard to get a report of the actual figures. For funded projects however they tend to use OSIRIS research project. Ms. P, feels that they need to improve on sending budget reports to project staff, at the moment these are just issued on request.
The faculty does not take undergraduates but has a complicated language teaching programme which involves graduates teaching undergraduates and the faculty charging the colleges for this undergraduate teaching (per student and for graduate teaching). They use a database to record all of this and also use it for other types of teaching too such as class teaching and tutorials. From the database the faculty can print a report of all the students in a college who have done a course and send this list to the college with an invoice. From the database they can also see how much each graduate has taught and how much to pay them.
Related to this, Ms. P also mentions a new IT initiative being undertaken by the faulty to set up an online assessment system so students can test themselves every week on their language improvement. Money has been received from HEFCE e-learning fund with ACDT support to make this possible.
The faculty is moving buildings and when it does it will have an online room booking system (same as OUCS) – they probably restrict it to a few people being able to input in data. Meetings are organized by e-mail and paper agendas are sent out before hand. She does not think Weblearn would be particularly useful here as not all staff use it or are familiar with it. There is no shared calendar and Ms. P. uses a PDA which syncs with Outlook on her computer.
The RAE co-ordinator e-mails all academics and asks for most recent and planned publications. Information is not set out in a way that it can be cut and paste into the database.
In terms of It support the faculty have a contract with NSMS for hosting. They also have a full-time and part-time IT member of staff. If help is needed they will contact NSMS or the IT officers. Some of research projects have their own part-time IT staff. Academics in colleges tend to go to college IT officers rather than the faculty ones.
Top three admin burdens
- Responding to e-mail
- Research Proposals
- Staff management