Latest Development from the KentVision Project

We have continued to listen to feedback, engage with colleagues, and design system improvements to ensure that KentVision improves a variety of processes as its implementation continues.

We have confirmed the immediate and future SITS features and functionality required with diverse stakeholder groups. The KentVision Delivery team has continued delivering the agreed enhancements, features, and functionality to meet the short-term academic calendar timelines.

Functional Area Working Groups

To ensure colleagues views and recommendations are fully considered, the KentVision Board established six Functional Area Working Groups to enable and track feedback from a variety of teams across the University. This has enabled the team to best prioritise future improvements to the system.

Functional Group members represent a mixture of colleagues from Divisions, professional services and central teams and are split across the following operational areas:

  • Statutory and Core student record
  • Admissions, Clearing and Recruitment
  • Assessment
  • Finance
  • PGR
  • Student Activity and Experience

The work of the Functional Groups, with the support of an independent SITS consultant, has enabled us to fully assess and prioritise the requirements of future improvements to help move forward key areas of work, reprioritising our plan where required in response to our changing circumstances. We will be updating colleagues on this delivery schedule for 2022 during June.

Our technology teams have been very busy in the background working to enhance various pieces of functionality, via a series of technology improvements, throughout the last year and we would like to share an update on our most recent deployment:

Assessments – Board of Examiners Meetings

The KV delivery team have worked hard with colleagues to gather as much feedback as possible to improve the Board of Examiners Meetings functionality – we have taken this feedback and held extensive discussions with staff through a series of workshops facilitated by our business analysts and developers.

The improvements that were recently deployed to live functionality have been widely praised by staff – with positive feedback received from our Show and Tell sessions. The improvements will help enhance processes – and deliver a better experience for our staff and our students. This year, we will gather live feedback during Boards so we can make fixes and enhance the functionality to prepare for future improvements in this area.

  • Significant development across all aspects of the board process following detailed user feedback. Functionality deployed to the live environment with a read-only version of board to be released.
  • Reconfigured board screens to ensure faster processing times for Divisions – enabling a smoother user experience.
  • A detailed results letter review was conducted with divisions and central teams; new templates created for agreed progression outcomes.
  • Significant changes to post-board processing functionality for central teams enabling a defined process and wider use by team members.
  • New end-to-end process in KentVision from mitigation committee through to internal, main, and post-board changes. All note recordings (module actions and outcome recommendations) are now recorded within the system.

These improvements are the culmination of months of hard work behind the scenes, and we commend everyone involved for their work -especially the users of the system dedicating time to ensure improvements are realised.

Next Steps?

  • Technology and process improvements are to continue with deployments scheduled through June and July.
  • A staged approach and timeline for delivery during 2022, of the far-ranging and numerous improvements, will be shared in June.
  • Detailed business readiness activities, including transition plans and training and communication.
  • Continuous updates on how our improvements, plans and communications are informed by feedback from our students and staff.