Service excellence in action: Streamlining the timetabling review process

19 Feb 2026

To speed up the management of the timetabling review process, the Faculty Scheduling team created a simple, trackable method to review live timetables, quickly work through amendments and give teaching staff oversight of changes. Nick Prideaux from the team explains more.

Situation

The Faculty of Humanities has over 10,000 taught activities running every year, with each having its own set of requirements, including contact time, type and size of room needed, staffing availability and pedagogy to name a few.

The Faculty Scheduling team (FST) works closely with Schools to support and collate all timetabling requirements for the upcoming academic year, modelling the activities and their requirements into a workable timetable.

Timetables are no longer rolled over because our requirements change from year to year. This has increased the need for a thorough timetable review to ensure we are in the best possible position when students enrol. Encouraging a review of over 10,000 activities by almost 1,000 academic and PS staff within a two-week window is always going to be challenging, even more so if conducted by email, which had been the approach used by many teams before the implementation of the timetable project began in 2023/24.

Action

To speed up the management of this review process and create a simple, trackable way to verify the activity data, all live timetables were stored in SharePoint with restricted access to specific sections to maintain data integrity. Online resources were also made available for teaching staff to visualise timetables.

Rather than only hearing from colleagues who had spotted an issue with their timetable (as we had done in the past), all staff taking part in the review were asked to either ‘confirm’ or ‘amend’ their activities. Where an ‘amend’ was recorded, staff were required to provide the specific details of the amendment for the associated activity.

Result

By managing the entire process through departmental shared reports, the FST could quickly work through amendments, change live data where needed and provide updates to those who had requested any amendment. Because of its transparency, senior academic colleagues had oversight of all amendments being submitted in their department and, crucially, we were able to generate a percentage of how many activities had been checked.

This allowed the FST to monitor engagement and target particular departments with additional support if needed. This method also provided an accurate and accessible audit trail of data changes throughout the timetable process.

By the time the review window closed, a ‘confidence in the timetable’ figure was calculated (by department, School and Faculty), which then fed into forward planning and resourcing as we progressed towards the start of semester 1 in 2024.

Want to find out more?

Email Nick Prideaux for more information on this project.

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