First Interview Complete

Today we had our first interview for the Self Assessment XCRI (AKA SAX) project. This is where we assess the Self Assessment for XCRI form for its usefulness in finding out how prepared the university is for implementing XCRI-CAP. It can also be used to help devise an implementation plan for those who choose to.

Our first guinea pig was the Director of Information Services, he was chosen as he already had a working knowledge of XCRI and had been involved in previous XCRI work at the university so would be familiar with the terminology and what state we are in if we wished to move towards implementing XCRI at the university. Our first step was to complete the form offline - as the first stage interviews where organised at short notice we decided to go through the questions with the Director of IS so we could discuss the questions, how appropriate they where and how relevant they were from the start. We printed out the excel spreadsheets (each stage was on a different page) and a 'key' sheet with the different dropdowns. I kept the questions and the Director of IS was given the 'key' sheet and was asked looking at answer set A with regards to this question... This method took approx 45mins to complete the four sections, with discussion.

The feedback we got was as follows:

• Questions with 'and/or' in them where difficult to answer i.e. we have a CMS system but in the process of buying a DMS - a 'Don't know' would have been useful.
• Previous involvement in XCRI work at the university meant that the results of the questions was not a surprise and did not take anything into account that hadn't already been considered.
  
• Some questions assumed a high level of commitment already to moving down the XCRI path
• XCRI drivers felt at this level to come from above, without which there often is little motivation to moving towards some of the work mentioned in the form. It would be useful to have these drivers acknowledged in the form rather than have them assumed.
  
• Under Planning The Output question 3 mentions 'all of the proposed sources' it was felt you would need a policy in place which would implement this before you could be brave enough to say yes to this - and even then it would be difficult to say yes without a lot of investigation.
• Management Implementation had a number of queries; Question 4 seemed to be very context specific with XCRI implementation, where it was felt it would be just as useful to ask if processes changes had been highlighted to manage course information (which could then lead to being used for an XCRI implementation). Q9 was felt not to be very meaningful and Q10 needed to include the option 'a combination of in house experts and outsourcing'
  

For our next set of interviews we will be asking those completing the form to compete it before we meet, with the form as an Excel Spreadsheet and with some links to the XCRI knowledge base (http://www.xcri.co.uk/). This way we can focus on the value of the assessment form rather than the answers to the questions.