College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Embedding of a single College Workload Allocation Model

The College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) have successfully delivered a revised single College Workload Allocation Model (WAM) which will assist with consistent, transparent and fair distribution of work within the College.

The College needed to undertake a root and branch review of the single WAM, due to the time elapsed since its inception some years ago.

In this latest project, the College reviewed and revised the single College WAM, embedded its use and increased the usage of the Simitive WAMS system.

This project continued and further developed the University’s partnership with Simitive, the supplier of the WAMS system. Simitive valued the project team’s experience and reflected on project closure that “UoE have a well-defined and clear structure to projects which is incredibly helpful – and rare.”

Alongside the analysis and system work, the College defined and implemented a Governance structure in the College to ensure that the College WAM is “owned” and maintained over time. A WAM Forum has been established with defined membership of academic and professional services WAM practitioners representing all Schools. All roles and responsibilities have been defined as part of the Governance work completed and standard processes and procedures have been agreed and implemented. The new governance process for changes will allow responsive review of tariffs and activities whilst still maintaining our requirement for transparency and consistency.

A new role of CAHSS WAM Lead has been created and appointed to lead the forum. Amongst other activities, the role holder has developed a new intranet site, providing a single source of “golden copy” information for all staff in the College.

The College was unable to achieve some of the work that was set out at the start of this project due to the amount of effort required to return the College to a single WAM, completing what was effectively a full re-implementation project and defining and implementing the Governance structure. The College is in planning for the next project to build on the success of this one which will include implementing TRAC codes in the WAMS system and APIs with central systems where possible.