Steady progress and secure funding

This month has seen slow ans steady progress on several fronts. We don’t have a big shiny reveal to boast about, just incremental work.

Much of my attention has been on staffing changes, as the funding for the data warehouse team is shifting from fixed-term to open-ended contracts. This means that some members of staff are leaving us as their fixed-term contracts or secondments come to an end, and that we are actively recruiting for new posts. I’m sad to see people leave, as we’ve formed a good team; everyone has got on well and produced great results.

Some members of the team are staying, which will give us continuity and will preserve the knowledge that we’ve built up over the last couple of years. I’m hopeful that we’ll quickly find new recruits to join them. The open-ended posts are good news and we offer an interesting variety of work, with the opportunity to learn new skills, as well as the excellent benefits provided by the university. So if anyone is interested in data warehousing work in the higher education sector, do get in touch.

Apart from the data warehouse work, we’re starting two new pieces of work on mapping data flows. One of these is to understand how data is sourced for student reporting systems, and the other is to record flows of personal data for our data protection officer. Both these are at the very initial stages and will require some time before they come to fruition, and I’m looking forward to working on them.