The University of Sheffield
Corporate Information and Computing Services

Programme Regulation Management System

Latest News

  • There has been good progress on the course finder, a facility to view published regulations
  • The next area of work is workflow - which is the main piece where academic departments and LeTS will interact with the system.

About the Project

Currently the Programme Regulations are held in MS Word files which are reviewed annually by academic departments and LeTS, before passing on to CiCS for entry into CIS and preparation for printing. This work is repeated each year.

The current process of transferring data from Word files into CIS results in two separate versions which differ from each other in places. Information is also not in place in time to be used for timetablers and for module choice validation in on-line registration.

The proposal for the project is to build an on-line system that allows departments to maintain course information themselves, with built-in checks where appropriate. This is essential to produce the data in time for on-line module choice and centralised timetabling.

However, prior to designing and building a system it has been recommended that the process of annual maintenance of Programme Regulations is reviewed, using the LEAN approach to review and improve the process.

In parallel, academic colleagues will be examining how the regulations themselves can be simplified. It is recognised that they must not be constrained by an on-line system, furthermore it is not cost effective to automate the most complex of regulations. Therefore a new system must have the capacity to cope with unvalidated module choice for the small minority of programmes where the regulations are too complex to encode and automate.

Timescales

  • Input and update Programme Regulation (Dec 2012 - completed)
  • Published Regulation - standalone (July 2013)
  • Develop, test and implement workflow for Departmental update and LeTS approval (Oct 2013)
  • Train users, system go-live and support (Nov 2013)
  • Link Published Regulation to student record (May 2014)

Project Documentation