As part of our continued commitment to improve products and services, we have now begun work on a series of new initiatives to support the current and future needs of our customers.
We are striving to work in a more dynamic way to improve the experience for all our customers and are implementing the ‘Agile’ methodology across the business. We want you to be fully involved in this process and work with us to develop our services. Agile is new to UCAS and will involve:
- developing in small increments and gaining early feedback – we will require fast feedback to enable us to shape high quality products. This may be sharing a screenshot for feedback or the testing of a task
- sourcing feedback from the direct users of a service – enabling us to tailor services to their requirements. We will use this feedback to shape our products
- development taking place in shorter ‘sprints’ – these are the set time periods our developers will work to in order to develop prototypes for testing. This will facilitate regular feedback, known as an ‘iterative approach’ to development
- sharing feedback – you will be able to track the development of products and services throughout the process
The services we are reviewing:
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Recognising that you may currently utilise in-house and third party systems, we will be developing our services with flexibility. You’ll be able to determine the services you want from us and integrate these using a modular approach.
Our long-term intention is to transform these services across our five schemes. However, we have to implement a phased approach and will begin this process with the UCAS Postgraduate scheme – for two key reasons:
- The UCAS Postgraduate scheme is relatively small and we will be able to test the new methodology succinctly before rolling out the solutions, reducing risk to all parties.
- The scheme does not involve any key dates and so provides us with flexibility.
Although the initial focus is UCAS Postgraduate, it is essential that customers across all schemes are involved in the feedback process, as we intend to use this work as the foundation for development of the other schemes.
How we shaped this proposition
Earlier this year we started to validate our approach to the development of our services with providers at advisory and focus groups. We will continue this activity to make sure development meets the needs of our customers. As such, we are confident that in the long term this supports the needs of the market and we are dedicated to this process. The UCAS Board is fully committed to this approach.
The feedback process
Now we have committed to this initiative, we are seeking customer support to provide us with feedback on our services. This will be an ongoing process but it’s critical to ensure we develop user-focused services.
We don’t yet have dates of when feedback will be required, as we are working with focus and advisory groups to determine the initial priorities. However, when the feedback process begins it will be ongoing and frequent, and there will be limited timeframes for response, to ensure the initiative progresses at pace.
We understand admissions colleagues have a vested interest in the entire process. We will, therefore, keep you updated on progress throughout. Below is an overview of how the feedback process will work.
The feedback process
We need to engage a number of colleagues within your organisation to ensure we have feedback from those who use our services the most. We would like to engage with:
- UCAS Correspondents – we will ensure our main UCAS Correspondent is kept informed throughout the process
- marketing colleagues – to be involved when changes will impact displays/information included in marketing materials
- data collection colleagues – we want to source feedback from colleagues who are the current users of our Course Collect services
- international colleagues – who may give us a different perspective on the developments
- IT colleagues – our Technical Relationship Managers will liaise with technical colleagues where change will impact on technical requirements
- planners – to understand how we can support the planning process
We will also engage with learners, advisers, agents and parents throughout the process, as key users of our services.
What's next?
At this stage there is no action for you to take. You may have noticed on the agenda of the upcoming Admissions Conference (30 March to 1 April) a business session taking place on day one – Developing our admissions services for the future. Andrew Hargreaves is co-hosting this with Martyn Annis, Chair of the ARC Admissions Practitioners Group and they will share more on how we intend to continue to develop our products and services in an inclusive and customer-focused way.
We do ask you to communicate this approach with colleagues within your organisation. If you have any questions please contact your Relationship Manager.