A consistent cross-college faculty activity reporting experience

Dr. Justine Reel, Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the College of Health and Human Services, arrived at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) in 2014. She encountered a system for gathering faculty information that pulled information from different silos and data points across the college’s three schools.

By 2017, the team had expanded and the data structure had become even more complex. “We needed to explore how to capture all that data,” said Robert Bucciere, Systems Training & Reporting Specialist at the college.

The school chose Faculty Success to support reporting across all three colleges. Reel kicked off the project by soliciting input from the directors of each of the three schools before introducing the software. These discussions revealed specific use cases for the data that would help the schools with their annual reviews, and Bucciere tweaked the system to generate this information for them.

The next step was a pilot program in the School of Social Work. During the program, the team solicited feedback from faculty, staff, and leaders that led to more adjustments to the system. After the pilot program, they introduced the revised solution to the two other schools.

Conversations with school directors drove initial buy-in:

The college achieved 100% buy-in at the three schools by fall 2018. The college spoke one-on-one with school directors to learn about their needs, and worked to incorporate their feedback into the system launch. This approach helped get faculty on board with the new system from day one.

Faculty Success features win faculty approval:

The college built out fields to accommodate reporting on additional activities like community engagement and student involvement. Faculty are better able to represent their work, and these details are useful for the college and broader institution.

Hands-on data entry creates a sense of ownership:

Throughout the pilot program, Bucciere had been single-handedly entering data into the system and soon realized that this process was not sustainable and decided that faculty had to “own” their data. “They know it the best,” Bucciere said. “They needed to be the ones entering the information.”