Managing complexity

The University has grown organically since its foundation in 1209. Organisationaly it consists of a complex federated set of entities. We use shorthand terms such as "big U" and "little U" to differentiate when we are talking about 'the University' as a central organisation with centralised administration, departments and libraries, from the broader University which includes the Colleges (31 legally separate entities) and many research institutes than have an orthogonal (and often very longstanding) relationship with some parts of "small U" which may or may not have some formal footing.

It's User Administration's job to make some semblance of sense of these links, and we are obliged to extend some or all University services to these affiliated institutions and their members. Sometimes licensing and contracts allows us to extend only a sub-set of our services, which is where things become complex. Our job is to make sure that everyone who should have access to University IT resources gets them and to act as gatekeepers where an individual or group is ineligible. Keeping track of these added complexities is a headache. As a general rule I try to keep things as simple as possible for my team.

One aspect of our work is to turn on and off Services as someone's role at the University changes. Ultimately we withdraw access when someone leaves. To assist this various central systems provide data feeds - the HR system tells us about University staff arrivals and departures (but not those of College staff and fellows), the student records system provides the same information for students. Next week is one of the significant events in our annual cycle - the purge of student accounts.

Take ~3,500 departing undergraduates. Sprinkle in about 5-600 postgraduates whose courses ended in June. Tell them at the end of May that you know they are finishing their course at the end of term and you will cancel them on a specified date in late July. This allows them time to finish off what they need to, sit back relax and enjoy May week, go home and (if they are organised) migrate their files off of our systems in an orderly manner.

About 500 usually expect to stay on for further study or become staff, of these around half actually do. Again our datafeeds from the relevant systems tell us who actually stays and goes. Extensions are granted only for those who expect to continue, and on the designated day scripts run across our database to cancel ~4,000 accounts. For the next week or so there will be phone calls and emails asking whether people can retrieve some forgotten files. Last year I counted ~100 of these in total, which is not bad considering the numbers that are actually leaving.

When August arrives most of the requests will have died down. This is when I and my team take our Summer holidays, in a complex jig of days off so that there is always cover. I have encouraged my team arrange these dates by consensus, checking a shared calendar of our collective leave with each person fitting around the slots that are already booked. This way everyone gets a decent break. By the end of August we will have brought live the accounts for the new undergraduate intake, and by mid-September we'll be back and bracing for the impact of ~4,500 new undergraduate and postgraduate arrivals at the start of October. From then to early December it will be a heads down, pedalling frantically to keep on top of the workload.