SIS Project: What We’ve Heard (March 2024)

In February, we continued our engagements with the university community by meeting with various units from many areas across campus for project updates, listening sessions, continuity planning and report remediation discussions. These meetings aimed to offer updates, give context and provide planning support for the Student Information System (SIS) Project through various presentations and discussions.

We are so glad for the thoughtful feedback from the groups we met with that contributed to stimulating discussions. Here are some of the main themes that came up during our conversations:

• Communications – Over the past month, we heard many new and different ways to best engage with students and staff across the university. We also heard that folks want to participate, share their views and stay informed about the upcoming launch of the new SIS project and the various system implementation projects.
• Timeline – We heard questions and concerns about how the ISIS replacement will be released—in phases or all at once—and how much overlap there will be with other projects and milestones in the academic year.  
• Workload – We had conversations regarding the concerns about the impacts on staff who are already overloaded and will be further impacted by directly working on the project implementation(s) via various teams and committees. Folks are asking how the SIS Project core team will directly address these effects on staff and inquiring if options like hiring contractors or consultants or expanding the scope of engaging talent already available from our university are considered as possible solutions.
• User experience – We continue to hear the importance of considering all populations when designing the ISIS replacement which includes perspectives from summer session and international, English as a second language (ESL), part-time and full-time students and the staff who support their experiences. Folks expressed their desire for a user-friendly ISIS replacement interface that supports and improves their interaction with the student information system. They also communicated how not bringing in usability and functionality considerations for accessibility early in the design phase can cause costly rework and disrupt timelines and deployment.

Thank you to the groups we met in February. We sincerely appreciate your input. You are an essential part of our community and we're grateful for your continued involvement.

We look forward to continuing these conversations with the university community. 

If it has been a while since we last met, and you would like to, we are keen to meet with you to understand your needs and concerns for the project. If you’d want to invite the SIS Project team to join a department/team meeting, please email us at esr-student@ucsd.edu.