Project FOCUS Updates

The Project FOCUS Steering Committee is pleased to announce the addition of two initiatives to the Project FOCUS program: FOCUS Awards and FOCUS Continuing Education.

Following the launch of Project FOCUS, it was determined bringing closely-related initiatives under the Project FOCUS umbrella would have a positive impact. The Project FOCUS Steering Committee identified a number of active projects as relating to the larger initiative.

The Project FOCUS umbrella will allow for various initiatives to integrate processes, systems, and resources so the university can leverage the investment in each project to the benefit of future projects. This also creates a shared understanding of how a particular initiative should run, resulting in cost- and time-saving efforts.

FOCUS Awards and FOCUS Continuing Education commenced prior to the launch of Project FOCUS and have been brought into the overall program in an effort to ensure integration and consistency of all aspects of our enterprise system. Future initiatives will also be evaluated to determine if they fall under the Project FOCUS umbrella, and will be introduced as they become part of the program.

FOCUS Awards

FOCUS Awards is an initiative designed to create an efficient, streamlined process from discovery and application, to awarding and publication of awards and scholarships at UNB. The goal is to enhance our student experiences, and to support recruitment, retention and advancement activities.

A working group has been diligently documenting our current processes and tools in place. One of the guiding principles of Project FOCUS is to make the most effective use of Colleague resources the university has already paid for. To support this principle, the team will undertake a full review of Colleague to determine what opportunities there are to fully leverage Colleague’s capabilities.

Through Project FOCUS, working teams will be examining the Colleague features currently available to the university. A request for product information process is underway in FOCUS Awards to learn more about potential software solutions in the event Colleague needs to be supplemented to meet the university’s requirements.

FOCUS Continuing Education 

The objective of FOCUS Continuing Education is to improve the student registration experience for non-credit programs and courses through modernizing registration and communication tools, and updated service-efficient integration. FOCUS Continuing Education is currently paused until the new year as the project team is waiting on required functionality to be released from the vendor.