{"id":133,"date":"2012-12-19T15:45:31","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T15:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/?p=133"},"modified":"2012-12-20T11:57:05","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T11:57:05","slug":"introducing-audrey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/2012\/12\/19\/introducing-audrey\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Audrey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Reflective<\/a>

Reflective tiles on external wall of Elliot College extension<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week Angela Watson and I gave a presentation to the Academic Division on the Kent XCRI project. We explained the overall aims of the national XCRI-CAP initiative and how that would bring benefits for propsective students and others but most of our presentation concentrated on introducing the fortyor so people present to the prototype Programmes Plant \u2013 the course administration system we are developing. The Programmes Plant \u2013 affectionately known as Audrey for reasons which I will leave you to work out \u2013 aggregates the data we need for the XCRI feed but it also does much more. It is a multi-user PHP application which next year we will roll out to administration staff in schools and departments – many of those in our audience will be directly affected by the work we are doing. Faculty staff will enter\u00a0 information on\u00a0programmes, learning outcomes, entry requirements etc directly into the application. After moderation by the Publishing Office to make sure entries conform to our Style guide and other rules,\u00a0 the data can be published direct to the course pages on the web. We are confident that the benefits of the Programme Plant will rapidly become apparent to all users \u00a0– though of course we can\u2019t deny there will be some disruption whilst we retire old systems and get users up to speed.<\/p>\n

Although not a stranger to speaking to groups small and large this particular presentation was making me nervous \u2013 I know Angela was having similar thoughts. We decided on a live demonstration of the prototype despite the misgivings of some of our developers. They didn\u2019t want to be left with egg on their faces if the prototype threw up an error. Angela and I perhaps had more confidence in them than they had in themselves. Or maybe we were just foolhardy? Anyway, as we had expected Audrey behaved impeccably. I think a successful live demo in real time can really boost the audience\u2019s faith in a team\u2019s ability to deliver. Much more effective than a few screen shots of \u2018how we think it is going to look\u2019. \u00a0It makes the transition from some ethereal future vision to something \u2013 well, \u2018concrete\u2019 is probably not the right term, but I think you get my meaning. But it wasn\u2019t that that was making us nervous anyway.<\/p>\n

I think it is always difficult to \u2018announce\u2019 to a group of staff that \u2018this is what you are going to be working with\u2019. No matter how much consultation you carry out beforehand, there will always be those who think you have got it wrong or didn\u2019t take their advice or that the old method was better. And sometimes they are right. But not this time we hope! Audrey Version 1.0 will not be perfect \u2013 like any other software it will be tweaked as the users start to use it for real work. Users will feed suggestions back to the developers so we can continue to improve it and fix any bugs.\u00a0 Even so, we have worked very closely with the product owner throughout the whole project\u00a0 and so we are confident that users will see benefits immediately.<\/p>\n

I think what really made us nervous was that in preparing for the unveiling of Audrey we came face-to-face with the realisation of just how important the work of this project is. Not just to the project team, not just to the Publishing Office, not just to Schools and Departments \u2013 but actually to the whole future of the University and to all our staff and students \u2013 prospective and current. \u00a0Does that sound over dramatic? I don\u2019t actually think it is. Now I am not saying that we weren\u2019t somehow aware of this anyway but when you have to explain what you are working on to someone not directly involved you do have to step back and put things into the context of the bigger picture. Within the project team it is easy to concentrate on whatever particular facet of the project is current and lose sight temporarily of the whole.<\/p>\n

To put things in simple terms, we are building an application that gathers data which will form the bulk of our public-facing output. The Programme Plant will\u00a0 aggregate data for the XCRI-CAP feed\u00a0 but will also manage all the data for Kent’s on-line prospectus pages. It will also be the basis for much of the data that we will provide to Unistats (KIS), HEFCE,UCAS, third party websites such as prospects.ac.uk and other websites which may not even exist yet. All these things are important but without on-line course pages we would struggle to attract students. This is a project we have to get right.<\/p>\n

I am pleased to say our presentation went very well and the work of the project was received with (almost) universal enthusiasm and approval. As I have already said it is not as if we didn\u2019t know this work was important but it is worth sometimes taking a few moments to remind ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Angela Watson and I gave a presentation to the Academic Division on the Kent XCRI project. We explained the overall aims of the national XCRI-CAP initiative and how that would bring benefits for propsective students and others but most of our presentation concentrated on introducing the fortyor so people present to the prototype […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":787,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[15226,774,19757,15220],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/787"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kent-xcri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}