Whether you-re using or delivering a service at UCL, we want it to be the best.
Together, we are not going to cure diseases or tackle global warming if tasks that need to be simple feel hard. So, with a world leading workforce of academics and professionals who value collaboration and doing a great job, we are making changes to speed up processes, support people better in their roles and create a community where we can achieve more. That is what is at the heart of our UCL Strategic Plan.
Don-t be afraid of change, it can be good, even if the outcomes feel uncertain now. Use the opportunities to think about processes too and standardise, standardise, standardise. This will reduce the cognitive load (and actual workload) on staff and also on students.
Professor Mike Rowson, Vice-Dean Education and Faculty Tutor for UCL Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
Making it easier to get things done
The online UCL portal called - My Services- is one example that many staff are already using on a daily basis when they need help from expert colleagues:
In the area of HR and ISD, we’ve revamped requests for support for your day-to-day and one-off tasks to provide you with the information you need faster
We’ve done this by creating a single destination called UCL MyServices; since launching in August 2024, it’s dealt with a mighty 340,000 services, we have cut down the time it takes for tickets to be resolved and requests raised by self-service has reduced the work for first-line teams to categorise and assign unstructured requests. Self-service jumped from 9% - 38%.
I’m glad that line managers now have more autonomy and can now benefit from how some of our processes have been simplified and made readily available to more staff. Before we had MyServices, only a handful of staff could submit HR requests but now everyone in an area can do this without needing to be granted specific permissions or going through bespoke training. It’s also really helpful now that it is a single clear portal where you can go for HR, Finance and IT queries rather than using the previous processes.
Ajay Patel, UCL Operations Manager
Improving the student admissions process
Studentspositive experiences of applying to and then studying at UCL is key to our continued success as a top ten global teaching and research university.
With that in mind, we have brought UCL-s central recruitment and admissions functions into one team under a new Executive Director of Recruitment and Admissions. Improvements already achieved or in the pipeline include:
Better access for admissions staff to track applications
Greater understanding of how admissions targets are set
Dynamic information on the number of offers made by each department
Access to data on diversity for each individual programme
Planning and developing a new admissions system which is undergoing final build before testing commences.
Bella Mallins, Director of Access and Admissions.
Creating consistency in responsibilities and careers
Over the past two years, the Education Administration and Student Experience (EASE) Programme has begun revising team structures and combining local knowledge with best practice and shared expertise to create more consistency in services delivered across UCL. This is helping to balance workloads and maintain services that are more responsive to the changing needs of our students and staff.
An example of this is the EASE programme in UCL faculties. Dedicated support staff and academics are working with faculty staff and professional services to co-design ways of working that offer greater levels of specialist support to academic departments and their students.
Where things have always been done a certain way by certain people for a long time, this can feel unsettling, and we recognise that. It’s one of the strengths of UCL that we are a community of problem solvers, willing to go the extra mile.
The downside of that though, especially in smaller teams, can be an over-reliance on single individuals to hold knowledge and keep everything running. That can mean departments missing out on best practice, with some colleagues feeling valued but isolated and lacking career development. And what happens when those colleagues get overloaded or simply aren-t around?
This is being addressed by ensuring that support staff are teamed up with colleagues in similar roles, supporting more than just a single department, line managed by experts in the services they are delivering, and that there-s parity between roles and job titles.
Again, we know that dealing with a team rather than a single individual can feel less -localat first. But where EASE teams are now up and running, colleagues in faculties have fed back a range of benefits including:
More supportive, professional and accountable environments
Staff benefiting from specialist line management and reporting
Students benefiting from better signposting to support
Greater agency, flexibility and continuity of services e.g. new team structures mean colleagues can share knowledge, problem solve together, and cover each other-s annual leave, so academics and others are well supported all’year round
Less duplication of effort and improved financial resilience as a result Increased clarity in terms of job roles, responsibilities and career progression
New networks and opportunities for staff beyond individual departments.
Through the EASE initiative 91 job titles and job descriptions across a faculty have been standardised to 39. This gives clarity to people-s responsibilities.
Listening to reimagine services
More than 700 people have been involved in roadshows to help reimagine our HR and Finance services, and we are grateful for their input as we start to make improvements in these areas.
You-ll appreciate that change takes time, and UCL is always evolving. So, in each case, we are establishing blueprints for changes that we can then fine tune with an even wider range of audiences for even greater impact, with an eye to futureproofing them too.
These include areas that stand to revolutionise and improve experiences and outcomes for staff doing vital work to support fundamentals. For example:
Identifying 50 improvements to the mammoth task of running our payroll system - with more than a quarter of those improvements already going live and the rest starting to be rolled out from July
Supporting colleagues in Recruitment to replace the system that we use to hire contractors
Co-designing better experiences for people working with Finance, Customer Billing and Settlement, and the way new staff are onboarded to UCL.
Increasing the impact of marketing and communications
As we approach UCL-s 200th birthday in 2026, there is no better time to look at how we help maintain our global standing in the world by working together to consistently tell the strongest possible story about UCL and its people. This isn’t just about our successes now and in the past, it’s about making sure all’our audiences understand the contribution that we want to make to society in the future too
We recognise that our people are the strongest ambassadors for us - how each of us behaves and talks about UCL has a huge impact on how people see us in the world, and therefore on whether they decide to study, research or partner with us.
There-s already work in progress to refresh our narrative and brand (the key messages we want audiences to engage with about our impact and vision, and the way UCL stands out through visual elements like our logo). Alongside this, our Marketing and Communications Programme strand of Services Simplification is working across UCL to enhance the quality, consistency and impact of our internal and external marketing and communications activity, and better support the teams who deliver it.
By designing and establishing clearer ways of working between departments, faculties and teams that deliver university-wide services, this will equip our community to promote the brilliant work of our university better, enhancing our influence, reputation and impact. This work is looking at levels of support, expectations and responsibilities for staff, and career frameworks for those involved in marketing and communications activities at UCL.
This programme is in its early stages but, in a collaboration between our Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences and the External Engagement team, it aims to improve ways of working. By changing staffing structures, we can create an environment that fosters more focused skillsets and resultant resourcing, with staff supported by leaders with greater expertise in marketing and communications.
What-s coming next?
To keep delivering against the UCL Strategic Plan, our change initiatives need to be ambitious, involve a wide range of audiences and to move at pace. We will continue to work with senior leaders, Heads of Department and Departmental Managers, as well as staff from across UCL, to build on this work and to support the people with the most important job of all, implementing and adapting to the changes.
By listening to staff and students and finding new and better ways of doing things together, we are achieving what staff tell us they most want - for things at UCL to be less complex and more efficient. Where this leads to financial savings, we can support other commitments in the Strategic Plan, like improvements to our campuses and investment in staff pay.
- I think the initial transition was difficult for academics in some departments, but we got over the hurdles within a few months. In other departments it got smoother and better, quicker. Overall, there is now a much more well supported team, with opportunities for sideways moves and promotions that didn’t exist before. I’m looking forward to developing other roles within the team in casework and quality assurance over time as we get a better balance between generalist and specialist support.Professor Mike Rowson, Vice-Dean Education and Faculty Tutor for UCL Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
