Sheffield Losing the Plot: the Student Lifecycle Project

How the University of Sheffield wasted tens of millions of pounds under Koen Lamberts’s leadership.

It had a shiny project overview page for the benefit of university staff, explaining what the trendy name actually meant: a new set of IT systems for managing student records. It promised a lot, but the staff and students who were hoping for “efficient, sustainable, sector-leading services” ended up not seeing anything of the sort.

There is quite a long story behind this.

Birth of a project

From a software point of view, a database system, like one which stores student records, has two different components: a “front end” and a “back end”. Programming the back end deals with questions like:

What kind of data is stored?
In what form is it stored?
Which questions will be asked repeatedly, and hence should have their answers kept ready and up-to-date rather than being looked up as needed?
What data is sensitive, and to which users should access to it be restricted?

Programming the front end, on the other hand, deals with questions like these:

What sort of searches are the users going to want to do, and how will they want to enter the data?
What things should be clickable in order to provide more detailed information and what information should be provided then?
How should reports be formatted if they’re downloaded?
What should the interface look like to the user?

Much like the head and handle of a mop, these components need to be connected together to be useful, and indeed they need to be designed with mutual compatibility in mind, but one can be replaced without the other. In asking whether the Student Lifecycle Project was necessary, one should ask how our longstanding student record systems (known as CIS and CIES) were doing, and in asking this one should consider the front end and the back end separately.

The front end of CIES is unlovely, but despite feeling like a throwback from more than a decade ago, it was (and still is) functional for most basic tasks. The back end has some significant limitations, however. Various components don’t sit well together: for example, there is a painful separation between attendance and student records, and another painful separation between admissions and student records. This makes some very natural queries (“Show me all students on my module who have less than 50% attendance”, “Can I compare A-level grades with marks obtained by first-years in my department?”) much, much harder than they could be. It had been reported that this had started causing significant problems for various central staff, particularly those charged with providing various standard reports to the government on our students.

There were also a number of issues which are significantly easier to fix but which caused great annoyance; on the whole, the one most complained about was the inability to record a preferred name for students. This was of course particularly upsetting to our trans students, but was also irritating for a large number of other students who are commonly known by some variation on their legal name.

A retired IT Services employee with experience of large projects speculated that fixing our existing systems would have been a plausible solution. This, if undertaken, would not have been a small project: it would likely still have cost millions of pounds, and would still have required a corresponding amount of staff time, in order to bring all our databases together. But it would have been a conservative option, and it is understood to have been preferred by senior IT Services staff at the time when discussions were ongoing.

Instead, the “Student Systems Project” was okayed in 2014, and given the flashier name of “Student Lifecycle Project” in 2017. The University’s Head of IT left soon after this was announced, and it is widely speculated that this may not be coincidence.

It was decided that the foundation of this project was to be the commercial SITS database system, sold by Tribal Group. This is used by many universities, but most of them installed it a long time ago: it is old software, approximately as old as our existing system, and nearing the end of its lifetime. Old software is something to be wary of: software often starts off elegant and easy-to-understand, but usually gets less so over time. Every time a new, previously unanticipated feature is added, a number of small fixes are needed to make it interact correctly with all the other components. Since these deviate from the originally-intended structure, these mends tend to make the code harder to read. Sometimes two apparently separate features can interact in unexpected ways, and mending code which has already been mended so many times that it is hard to read is a recipe for disaster. On the whole, the older the codebase is, the more likely it is to be full of such problems.

However, despite the unremarkable nature of their product, Tribal Group is a wealthy company, who have significant resources that they can put into attracting clients. Our own IT Services department are, presumably, not able to compete on anything like level terms for the attention of impressionable members of the University Executive Board.

Retrenchment

Soon the lofty ambitions of SLP met their first problems.

A meeting of the “Council Oversight Group: Student Lifecycle Project” on 21st October 2019, whose minutes formed part of the Council papers on 25th November 2019, makes interesting reading in hindsight. It states (p8) that the budget was £19,272,653 “assuming delivery in 2020”.

Already at this stage, this assumption of timely delivery was predicated upon a considerable scaling down of ambition. It says (p8 again), in painful language, that “there are a number of benefits that are not expected to be realised, primarily as a result of items being de-prioritised to enable delivery of priority services”.

At that stage the things that were “de-prioritised” were (p19) “Ability for staff and students to access a holistic view of a student’s interactions with the University, enabling Personal and Academic Tutors to provide high quality, personalised advice”, (p18) “Increased speed of signposting to support services”, and (p14) “Elimination of time intensive paper-based student record management activities”: in other words, some of the activities most likely to be of benefit to the majority of staff and students.

This partly invalidates the justification of the project given initially by Rob Sykes (the “Executive Director of Academic Services and Senior Responsible Owner of SLP”). His statement says “Using paper based processes and working across multiple systems steals time from our working day”; already by this point UEB were compromising by allowing the continuation of such time theft.

Lastly, even though they were, at the time, confident (p9) of avoiding the problem of “budgets spiralling and problems with effective delivery”, they did have some sobering comments about governance (p3). It is written in painful management jargon, but we think that “it became less clear what the executive and management lines were… specifically whether they were the same or different roles who were handing over and accepting risks” means “we have no idea who is in charge of whom, who holds the power to authorise things, and who has responsibility for the things that have been authorised”. This may possibly remind readers of other governance issues that have been identified within the university.

Delays

In any large IT project such as this one, the cost of purchasing software and support is fairly minimal: what really costs is the time taken by staff to write and configure the new system, move data over, and work out how to use it in practice for routine maintenance tasks. Most of these are regular university staff, and since the university must pay them by the hour, the budgets for projects like this are based on using the staff for a certain period of time.

As a result, delays and overspends come hand-in-hand: the easiest way to overspend is if the project goes slower than expected and it becomes necessary to pay the staff to work on the project for longer.

So it was that a massive delay and a massive overspend was announced: in its minutes of 23rd June 2020 (on p2), “Council confirmed the approval… to the extension of the SLP to 2021, and to the release of an additional budget of £13.21m.”

Together with the original budget, this, of course, makes nearly £32.5m spent.

This came at a time of austerity elsewhere within the University, and was indeed at the time of Vice-Chancellor Koen Lamberts’s first head-on collision with his own staff. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the university had threatened a fire-and-rehire programme to worsen the terms and conditions of its staff. This was fought off by the campus trade unions, but, in an email announcing cost-cutting measures on 9th July 2020, Lamberts wrote to all staff to say:

“Our Council Finance Committee recently agreed to fund some posts to support the continuation of the Student Lifecycle Project, even at this critical time, as the alternatives were either much more expensive or would expose us to unacceptable risk to a critical part of our infrastructure. I know that this may seem at odds with other actions we are taking, but I want to reassure you that we will only make such decisions where strictly necessary.”

More delays and more retrenchment

Despite the professed need to see the project through, behind the scenes, UEB had apparently started to worry more. The university appointed a new “Business Transformation Director” (in May 2020) in order to oversee the project. Later (around March 2021), the university advertised for a new “Assistant Director of Product Delivery” requiring a “can-do, problem solving attitude” for a role including “IT Services responsibilities for the Student Lifecycle Programme”.

In January 2021, UEB put out a brief statement that they would be “recalibrating” the programme. They stated “it will require us all to work a bit differently but it is an exciting time”.

Apparently recognising that others might not share their excitement, they were at pains to attempt to reassure: “However, this does not mean that current or completed work will be lost as we will use all that we have completed so far to help us in our analysis and will be adopting new approaches going forwards.”

Senior staff have been cautious to follow their lead, using the word “recalibration” so frequently that it appears to take on a euphemistic value. On 20th May 2021, the newly-appointed Business Transformation Director gave a talk about the changes. One slide read, “We are currently recalibrating the programme to reflect the original intention to deliver benefit by staying as close to the ‘standard product’ offering from Tribal as possible… UEB… has agreed that the programme must utilise an ‘off the shelf’ solution to avoid the creation of an overly complex and highly customised system, that is difficult to maintain.” By this point the team had “Almost doubled in the last year since I’ve been here”, and, at around 120 people, was “almost bigger than IT Services” (the University’s in-house IT department, which runs services for the University’s 8,000 staff and 31,000 students, including several supercomputer clusters).

The euphemisms kept coming: at around this time, the term “Minimum Viable Product” started to be used to describe the desired end goal. After a few weeks, however, this term was banned for being perceived as too negative, and “out of the box” and “off the shelf” were preferred.

A webpage from about that period showed optimism: “It feels like the programme knows itself now in a way that it didn’t 12 months ago, the right governance is in place and Mike Hounslow as Executive Sponsor will make sure that we are making the right decisions and flagging any risks early.” Mike Hounslow retired from the university, and from the University Executive Board, in mid-2021 with the project still very much unfinished.

As well as the staff increases and reductions in ambition, further delays were being muttered about. UEB had become increasingly secretive: no papers from the “Council Oversight Group: Student Lifecycle Project” had been published since October 2019. At the meeting of Council on 8th February 2021, there was a “closed minute and paper” (item 14, p5), and it can be deduced (from item 6.1(a) on p2) that this relates to SLP.

Cancellation

Eventually, the project was scrapped altogether in late 2021. This decision went unannounced: there were no buzzword-laden emails from the University Executive Board. It was however reported extensively in the media: both in the local papers, and in a series of three articles by the pioneering technical news website The Register. Communications focussed on the insights that had been gained from tens of millions spent, but, propaganda aside, there was not a great deal to show for it. The only fragments that were implemented were small (for example, the part to do with curriculum).

Given the announcement by Lamberts of the project’s vital status the year before – a priority even in the middle of a public health emergency – there was no discussion of whether we would now be forced to use “alternatives” that were “much more expensive”, or whether we were exposed “to unacceptable risk to a critical part of our infrastructure”.

Of course, it is clear from papers in the public domain that spending up to £30m was approved. Beyond that, it is clear that the extra staffing and apparent continuation of the project beyond 2021 would have constituted a significant extra expense. While the total cost was never made available, we would speculate that continuing at the rate of spending of 2020-21 will have raised the total cost of the project to something well over £30m.

The human cost

Inevitably, even with the best will in the world, the economic costs of such a complicated project as SLP do not represent the full cost. Even if there were ample resources to replace staff moved to SLP (and this was far from the case), it is not so easy to replace expertise.

In this case, it is not clear that there has been the best will in the world. One UCU member told us, “There’s a detrimental effect caused by secondment to the SLP: both for the staff who are going and coming back broken, and to groups who are having problems backfilling labour.” Another said, “I complained about the extra workload caused by the SLP, and the response was to try to send me to a ‘change management workshop’, to overcome my adversity to change.”

It’s clear there was a certain amount of hubris by UEB in this process: in avoiding the advice of their own IT staff (as mentioned, reportedly resulting in the departure of the then-head of IT). There has been speculation that one reason they may have been so keen to have “sector-leading services” was a hope that some part of the extra code originally planned to supplement SITS may have had resale value.

With every delay and every sign of additional expense, UEB became less and less open with its staff about the project. One could see this in the increasing use of standardised euphemisms alone, but more critically in the decreasing thoroughness and frequency of reports in Council paperwork: as the project has become increasingly beset by difficulty one would expect more open discussion of the issues, risks, and costs, not less.

Lastly one sees it with the lack of visible accountability: despite the language of “Executive Sponsors” and “Senior Responsible Owners” there was no responsibility assumed by senior management. Nobody on UEB resigned as a result, including the much-trumpeted Senior Responsible Owner.