The Covid-19 pandemic has seen many radical changes, especially in how we work. The new work from home scenario has forced us to reconsider how we communicate with our colleagues, hold meetings and even how we maintain a healthy work-life balance. Overcoming these challenges has led us to further utilise the software available to us, in particular Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft teams is collaboration and communication tool that allows chat, live audio or video calling, scheduled group meetings with up to 250 participants, planning, notes, attachments and is closely integrated with Office 365 tools like SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook. More professional than WhatsApp, but less formal than an email, Teams feels like a virtual office floor, allowing users to continue working together, even in isolation.

Teams focusses on the creation of, well, ‘Teams’ – groups of users who work together on an ongoing basis. Within each team, users can create ‘channels’ that create a space for members to focus on a particular topic and help organise conversations. Within the Service Management Team, the ‘Service Issues’ channel creates a space to discuss complications or changes to services, while the ‘Cabin Fever’ channel creates a space to replace verbal office banter. Having a separate ‘Cabin Fever’ channel also allows for other channels to be kept professional.

The rising popularity of Teams for home working can be seen in the change in usage before and after staff began working from home, shown in the graphs below which highlight the number of chat messages sent both privately and as part of a team chat (Graph 1) and the number of conference calls/meetings held virtually through Teams (Graph 2).

The graphs show a rise in Teams usage beginning on the 15^th of March 2020, the date from which staff began to move to a work from home scenario. This increase has continued steadily since lockdown measures were introduced, with the exception of weekends (like March 21^st-22^nd). Despite this rapid increase in usage, however, the service has been continuously delivered successfully and has received positive feedback from users.

The new need to work from home also means there are new users that have just begun to use Teams for the first time. Fortunately, the Office 365 team in Service Management have developed a Teams guidance site, in collaboration with the Digital Skills team. This site offers detailed guidance on how to use the different features of teams, as well as hints and tips for best practice and to best develop your Teams skills. The site also includes a noticeboard, giving users regular updates about the service and any upcoming changes.

A particular focus area of Teams which has proved useful during the lockdown period has been the ability to easily schedule meetings using the Outlook calendar or the “Meet now” feature (for ad-hoc impromptu meetings), replacing in-person meetings with virtual Team meetings using both audio, video and screen sharing. For users new to holding meetings through Teams, the website offers detailed guidance on how you can set up a meeting and best practices, which can all be found here. There is even guidance on ‘Meeting Etiquette’, with useful tips such as muting your microphone when joining a meeting to limit background noise, when to use the meeting chat function and (importantly) how to blur your background to avoid showing any areas of your home you might not want colleagues to see!

Additional features for Teams are also in development, including using Teams to hold Live Events* – a broadcast feature that allows for audiences of up to 10,000 people. Use of Teams for audio conferencing is also in development, which will allow home users to ‘dial in’ to Teams meetings using a code sent to their phone. These features are being developed in partnership with the University of Edinburgh Business School, Microsoft Software Team and the Learning Spaces Technology Team as part of Learning, Teaching and Web.

For more useful hints and tips on using Teams to work from home, visit the Teams Guidance page and follow our Twitter (@UoE_ISApps), where we will be tweeting our top Teams tips over the coming weeks.

*Live Events are limited to 15 concurrent sessions across campus.  Our teams are working to develop a service model based around ‘fair use policy’ for the organisation and also training for successful delivery of ‘Special events’ using Teams.  We expect this model to be agreed in the coming weeks.

Postgraduate applications can be a challenging and daunting experience – and not just for the students applying. For staff, processing applications during peak periods can result in mundane repetitive tasks leading staff to become increasingly frustrated. Furthermore, the number of postgraduate applications have been increasing, with the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) seeing a 116% increase in applications between November 2018 and November 2019 and a 70% increase for College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS). This means that staff are under greater pressure to process a growing number of applications in a suitable timeframe.

The system caused problems for students too. Applicants received misleading messages telling them to log in to the service every time the status of their application was updated. In some cases, applicants even received notification saying their application was complete, only to later have it rejected as it was, in fact, incomplete.

It is against this backdrop that a recent project aimed to address these issues with improvements to the postgraduate application process designed to better support staff and applicants. These changes centred on EUCLID, the University’s student records web portal. EUCLID is where direct admissions applications are submitted, processed, reviewed and finally, a decision made and communicated to applicants.

A crucial part of the project was its benefits-led approach – meaning that improvements for staff and applicants were the main focus throughout. To insure these benefits, the project took an agile management approach – interacting closely with service users, including face-to-face interaction. This helped to insure that the project benefits were fully realised, resulting in major improvements to the system for both groups.

By reducing processing times by up to 86% staff will save 805 hours of work annually – roughly 115 working days. With over one million pages now no longer required to be loaded, users will also experience faster loading times. Another improvement to help staff efficiency is the ability to reject in bulk for incomplete applications, rather than making tedious status changes to each application. For example, when 900 rejections needed to be processed due to incomplete documents in CAHSS, the process took 13 hours. This has now been reduced to 8 hours.

The user experience for applicants has also been greatly improved. Beyond faster loading times and improved service support, the improved system will now also only contact applicants when a decision has been made, more information is required or if there is important information requiring their attention. These improvements will not only reduce the number of messages sent between applicants and staff, but also help to create a more positive and less stressful service experience for applicants. This will reduce the risk to the University’s reputation, with fewer students complaining about their experience.

The many benefits of the project have been well received. Director of Postgraduate Admissions at CAHSS Rhona Hajcman commented “The improvements to the system are massively positive for Direct Admissions users across the University as well as improving the experience for applicants”, while CAHSS Admissions Officer Kirsten Hutchison noted that “Overall, these improvements have resulted in significant time savings and new functionality has allowed us to improve our processes”.

The project is part of the Student Systems Partnership, which is a collaboration between the University Secretary’s Group and Information Services Group, working within Student Experience Services.