Background
Delivering educational excellence in a first class learning environment is key to everything the staff at Solihull College undertakes. Solihull College is totally committed to giving students what they need to succeed. By providing first-rate facilities, strong student support and high quality teaching Solihull College create the ideal environment for their students to achieve.
With over 36,000 part-time and full-time students pursuing further and higher educational studies a recent report, by the Inspectors of the Office Standards in Education (Ofsted), rated Solihull College as ‘outstanding’ for its ability to meet the needs of learners, for educational and social inclusion, for preparation for life and work courses and for its capacity to improve.
Information and communication is an integral part of any modern education facility. Solihull College provide a rich learning environment including an extensive communication network of around 2,000 personal computers and the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) team lie at the “heart” of delivering that success.
Problem
As Solihull College continued to grow, the student numbers increased and the technology networks had to meet greater demand. The complexity of the ICT operation involved information networks for both staff and students over two major campus sites and eight satellite operations. It was essential to ensure uninterrupted access for information sharing and assessment reporting over the College networks. The multi-disciplinary skills of ICT staff had to be coordinated including technicians, support staff, and network professionals, often over extended working hours.
Even
scheduling a small number of staff effectively had always been a problem with paper and pencil. However when the ICT staff increased to seventeen with a requirement for multi-role deployment, this rapidly made the scheduling task unmanageable. Sandra Forsdike, an experienced ICT Supervisor, was finding she was spending more and more time delivering her team schedules. Manual preparation was next to useless, with any number of changes making them quickly out of date before they were even pinned up on a notice board.
The ICT team was not an outsourced unit but part of the College. They shared the same values and mission of the College. They had the knowledge, and experience to respond flexibly to whatever demands the College required. The manual scheduling process had become a barrier to achieving these goals and had to be replaced.
Solution
A research of the web provided the opportunity to download and evaluate Schedule24™ Professional. This enabled the team to discover how to organize and layout team schedules. Immediately an improvement for managing the information clearly and over much greater date ranges was achieved. It did not take long for the team to satisfy themselves it would do all they wanted and
Schedule24 Professional was deployed to manage the workforce scheduling requirement of the ICT.
Schedule24 is used to schedule the working hours of all the teams according to their responsibilities. It's now easier to maintain accurate records of working hours, holidays and other absences. Scheduling staff assignments are better coordinated and this enables “schedules within schedules” to allow job roles to be shared.
There are few management skills that have such an impact on both staff well-being and business strategy as workforce scheduling. Sandra Forsdike firmly believes maintaining the workforce schedule is the Managers’ job. Schedules are now completed in a fraction of the time. It only takes a couple of hours to deliver a three month scheduling strategy based on the College term timetable. When changes are needed they can easily be updated. Above all the staff really like it. Schedules are published online so they are able to access their scheduling information from anywhere on the campus – or even from home - several weeks’ even months ahead so they can now plan their time. Frankly, she firmly believes ICT would really struggle without it.
About ICT Solihull College
The ICT Services team supports the information technology and communication needs of students and staff at Solihull College. The team is responsible for the provision and maintenance of all IT and network equipment and software at the college. There are two sub-divisions within ICT Services, the network team and the desktop support team. ICT services works closely with the ILT development team which is responsible for promoting the effective use of IT in the curriculum.
IT Support
Solihull College
Blossomfield Campus
Blossomfield Road
Solihull,
B91 1SB
United Kingdom |
Phone: +44 (0) 121 678 7000
Fax: +44 (0) 121 678 7200
Web site: http://learn.solihull.ac.uk/ictservices |
Read more about Solihull College and Schedule24 Professional by downloading the case study in PDF Format.
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