Common questions

At this stage, as we finish exploring the process challenges we share, we almost have a full understanding of what best practice we can adopt. From April to July, we'll be able to start sharing what that looks like in practical terms, and invite departmental representatives to help their communities with testing and training.

A huge range of operational and academic staff have been involved in our in-depth workshops since we kicked them off last year. We've just reached a point to widen representation to all communities through the Change Network, so that expertise is only going to expand further from here on out. A huge thank you from all of us.

Change affects us all differently, and can raise a mixture of emotions – especially when we don't yet have all the answers. Our existing change and wellbeing resources, including our employee-assistance programme, can help you through that uncertainty. If you're a line manager, they also include resources to support you leading others through periods of change.

In practice, the move to 'direct access' means you might be doing certain tasks that you currently ask someone else to do for you. This might seem like added effort, but the reality should showcase the time it'll save you – nothing 'lost in translation' through emails, no waiting in queues for requests to be dealt with, the ability to see dashboards and reports in a couple of clicks. We'll be able to demonstrate more later this year.

It's true that there are savings targets from the transformation. We're taking the opportunity to manage York's evolving needs over the next five years as people naturally retire or progress to new roles. This means not recruiting new staff for areas of work that become more automated, while making sure the staff doing those tasks right now can focus more of their time on their specialisms.

Over the coming months, we'll be working closely with Change Advocates across the University to make sure we can create a comprehensive training plan that's as effective and convenient as possible. We'll use these conversations to shape a range of guided and self-directed options – tailored to various staff groups, and phased to make sure they're available at the points people need them.

We'll be adopting best practice across our processes and policies wherever possible, but everyone's insights are proving vital to make sure that any changes will work for the University and subsidiaries as a whole. The workstream teams – HR; finance; data and tech; and change management – are discussing them every week to guide the more nuanced decisions, and to readjust where we need to.

We're confident it will. We've faced past examples of implementing technology with fixed workflows, which have then fallen short of expectations. This time, we're co-creating with staff at all levels to fully analyse our processes and policies, which allows us to configure the platform around the most effective ways of working. We can't promise everyone everything – but we will be in a position to continuously refine after we go live.

It's a significant financial investment. But it will cost a lot less than renewing all the expiring systems we currently use – not to mention the staff time spent grappling with them. I've been leading the cost-benefit analysis around the transformation, and we expect it to save us £36m over the next 14 years.