Congratulations to Helen May from Stakeholder Relations, the winner of our Simplify New Year’s resolutions challenge on the Ideas Space. She was presented with her prize, £100 of Amazon vouchers, by Jo Horsburgh, Deputy Registrar.

Helen’s winning idea was for Warwick Conferences to accept email confirmation of bookings. Wendy Coy (Director of Commercial Operations for the Campus and Commercial Services Group), said:

Great news! We have collaborated with colleagues in the legal team, finance team and sales team, and are pleased to be give advance notice that the process of booking training and conference facilities internally will move to a new simpler solution in April 2015. Full details to follow, but email authorisation and acceptance of terms and conditions will deliver a simpler, efficient service, and contribute to reducing printed materials. Many thanks for the suggestion, and many thanks to the team who will make it work!"

Jo Horsburgh said:

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our New Year’s challenge – with over 1600 views and 103 comments, it was a great start to our Ideas Space. There are lots more ideas to get involved with, so do take a minute to have a look and share your thoughts!

The New Year’s challenge

Thank you for taking the time to get involved! A panel reviewed all 12 ideas submitted to the challenge between 11 December and 5 January, and four were approved. The remaining three ideas are:

Online holiday forms

Online holiday forms are expected to be part of a new HR system. In the meantime, the IT Services training team have already designed three forms as an interim, local solution. Angela Roxburgh from the team comments:

These forms can be used to calculate and record annual leave based on daily and hourly calculations. They will accommodate recording annual leave for staff who are full time, part time and on fixed term contracts. We hope to make these forms more widely available once testing has been completed. If you are interested and would like further details please feel free to contact me."

Departments reporting to central university

One portal where all reporting and deadlines could be held for all academic departments, with details of who is responsible for them and where they should be submitted.
What do you think? Share your ideas on how we could make this work.

Let staff update information centrally

This idea proposes that staff are given the ability to update their HR and payroll information online, removing the need to submit and process paper forms. The team are considering this as part of the new HR system.

Warwick is in the early stages of a project concerned with updating our HR systems. While it is too early to be able to provide detailed information, a key deliverable of the project is to ensure excellent user experiences while interacting with HR processes, as such holiday forms and updating your personal information online both specifically feature in the work.

Get involved..Only a week to go to submit ideas/comments on the Moodle challenge.

Moodle module spaces are already used by many departments as single online location for resources and activities, presented in an easy to navigate format. We want to ensure that we make these spaces as good as they can be. To do this, we’d like input from you!

The first stage of this challenge is putting all the ideas into the pot. This stage will end on Monday 30 March. Let us know what would help your students, save you time, and improve the quality of online module provision.