The Graduate Research Information System (GRIS) successfully went live on Friday, July 1. Around 80 staff attended GRS’s pre-Go Live demonstration sessions in Sydney last week and in Canberra the previous week, and as of yesterday, 119 users have logged in to GRIS, including sessions from as far afield as Germany, Slovenia, Serbia and Taiwan! So far 16 variation to candidature requests have been lodged by candidates and GRS have routed 19 admission applications to Schools for assessment.

Huge thanks must go to the GRIS development team, very ably led by ‘Scrum Master’ Peter Norton from UNSW IT. Those of you who attended the fortnightly Sprint Review sessions during the development of Phase 1 would have met the team and seen how well they incorporated feedback into the development process, and how engaged they were with GRS as stakeholders. This clearly led to a much more refined and user friendly system, able to cope with the variances in process within different Schools and Faculties.

Planning is now underway on the next module of GRIS – Annual Progress Reviews. If anyone would like to attend the fortnightly Sprint Review sessions for APR please let me know so I can forward you the calendar invites. GRS are looking for stakeholders who use the APR system regularly and can commit to attending a Sprint Review session each fortnight – these are held on Fridays 11-1, and the next session is this Friday. Not all sessions run the full 2 hours, it depends how much development there is to demonstrate (and how much discussion this generates!).

For more information, visit the Graduate Research School website, or email enquiries.grs@unsw.edu.au