New Portico Functionality for Programme Approval and Prospectus Copy Calls

Programme Summaries – Where we are

Work to introduce an online solution for managing Programme Summaries - our definitive record of each programme – was paused last year as we prioritised our response to the pandemic, but the initiative has been restarted and we will soon begin the testing phase.

The aim is to use Portico as the ‘single source of truth’ to capture programme information at the point of programme approval or amendment, and for outputs like the prospectuses and public facing websites removing the duplication of information.  Updating programme information once and repurposing the information will save staff time, provide students with consistent information and help UCL adhere to the requirements of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

New Functionality 

We are making changes so that you can do the following directly in Portico:

1) Propose, amend or withdraw programmes and submit these requests directly to Academic Services for approval and action.

2) Maintain and edit prospectus information for your programmes as part of the copy call process.

The current work also includes importing existing prospectus information from ReportLab and integrating the data with the programme pages that CAM are developing as part of a new online prospectus.  

Timings

We are nearing completion of the development work needed to release this new functionality into Portico and will progress as follows:

April/May 2021 – Complete User Acceptance Testing of the new functionality in Portico

If the solution passes through User Acceptance Testing, we will continue with:

May 2021 – Phasing in the programme approvals functionality in Portico: We will initially focus programme amendments and invite a number of departments to begin using the system through the summer term.

June 2021 – Copy Call is managed in Portico for the PG Prospectus 2022

September 2021 – Start publishing the PG Prospectus from Portico

September 2021 – Programme approvals, amendments and withdrawals all submitted and managed through Portico by default. Current process of emailing attachments is retired. 

Next steps

At this point, we are raising awareness of the development work and putting it on your radar. We will follow up with more specific details once we know more about the outcomes of the User Acceptance Testing. This will include a plan for training on using the system and validating the data that has not previously been maintained through ReportLab or Portico.

Contact email for further information: lifecycle@ucl.ac.uk