Overview

The Great Service Programme has grown out of the former Services Transformation project (ERP), representing the next step of the project, the decision and delivery phase. 

Our ambition remains the transformation across Professional Services and the evolution of the College operating model to provide more effective support to departments and to promote a more consistent approach to service delivery.   

To support our operations, the Great Service Programme has two core objectives: 

1. Replace ICIS, the College’s current enterprise resource planning (ERP) system 
2. Redefine how we work and interact across all areas of HR, Procurement, Finance and Research Administration. 

What will the Great Service Programme deliver?

The Great Service Programme aims to enable you to focus on your role and deliver the best services to our community, reducing workload and manual admin/peripheral tasks. It will also help us to adapt to meet future demands, allow staff to invest more time in value-adding activities, and enable the College to grow. 
 
The Great Service Programme will enable:

Our approach

Our work is shaped around the following key design principles:

People come first, meaning the focus is on a simpler, easier, and faster experience for all involved. 

• We have convened a project team of nominated cross-College subject matter experts from HR, Finance, the Research Office, and representative academic departments to help define how we can change for the better and the impact of doing so. 
• Processes are assessed from an end-to-end perspective, cutting across activities taking place in departments and professional services. 
• We are currently working through best practices and the optimisation of process steps to enable standard and efficient approaches with consistent clear roles and responsibilities. 

Data will be consolidated to build a “single source of truth” supporting transparency and decision-making.  

• Data is key to supporting everything Imperial does, from ensuring our people have access to wellbeing and support materials, to great staff networks, it all relies on good quality data.   
• By gathering and ensuring our data is consistent, not only will we support the Imperial vision, but we will also further improve the working life of our people. From making sure staff have the tools they need to do their jobs, to paying expenses, to managing projects and research finances - data drives the information with which decisions are made.   

The programme, including its impacts and benefits, will be quantified, measured, tracked, and communicated.

• We will be working with representatives from across the College to reduce the impacts of change on our people and help them to adopt new processes and systems more rapidly.  

Current progress and next steps

We are currently making good progress in choosing our system vendor. Once selected, we will then move to system procurement and the beginning of our detailed design and delivery phase of work.

Many staff members have already taken part in workshops and focus groups to map processes and identify current pain points.

We are working now to prepare the foundations for the delivery phase, and in 2024 you will begin to hear much more about the Great Service Programme.

If you would have any questions or would like to know more, please email opusprogramme@imperial.ac.uk.