Case Study: Timetable Management

Learn how MetaPM helped a leading higher education provider make efficient utilisation of their facilities through Timetable Management.

The Challenge: For many years, this university lacked time table management and were rolling over their timetable from one academic year to the next, resulting in a poor student experience and suboptimal use of its classroom facilities and available resources year after year.
Every year after publishing the timetable, it had to be significantly modified to accommodate changes associated with student enrolments, staff allocations and physical resource availability, putting intense pressure on the timetable team and academic staff. The university decided to put an end to this and embarked on a Timetable Rebuild project.

The design of the new timetable was a cumbersome task due to the complexity and inter-dependency of the academic decisions and the technology constraints to provide the right information at the right time. The timetable processes, underlying capabilities, and roles and responsibilities of resources needed to be aligned to meet the new timetable requirements.
MetaPM Approach: MetaPM reviewed the maturity of existing timetable processes, technology capabilities and skill set of the staff involved in preparing the timetable. Gap analysis between the current state and the desired state was conducted, and a Strategy and Implementation Roadmap to achieve the desired outcome was developed, based on the university’s long term goals and vision.
MetaPM collaborated with a wide variety of stakeholders across the university to achieve their buy-in and agreement on the approach to deliver the proposed timetable. This led to the design and implementation of the new processes, new roles and responsibilities for the timetable team, and the introduction of integrated technology to enable the proposed timetable.
The work associated with the proposed timetable has been launched in conjunction with the old timetable to measure its efficiency and effectiveness and provide a smooth transition to the new version.
Results: The deliverables produced during this engagement were:

• Process framework
• Timetable processes
• New team organisation structure
• Roles and responsibilities
• Technology work instructions
• Timetable governance framework

The final outcome of this engagement will be a new timetable that provides a better student experience in addition to the optimum utilisation of university facilities. In addition, the University timetable team also improved its skills to identify and manage the timetable related issue in an efficient and effective manner.