The culprit? The disastrous launch of a new student management system, MUSL (Maastricht University Student Lifecycle), which achieved the opposite of its intended purpose: to improve student service and make university admin more efficient (read: cheaper).
While Faculty of Law staff scrambled to fix what they could during that first week of the academic year, University College Maastricht decided to postpone classes by a week. On top of the scheduling chaos, faculties had no way of knowing how many students had enrolled in their bachelor’s and master’s programmes. Meanwhile, students received automated reminders at random: “You still haven’t submitted a passport photo” or “Please sign the direct debit authorisation form for your tuition fees”. Others couldn’t access their university email, hadn’t received a UMcard or weren’t properly registered with their faculty at all.
Teething troubles
In short, it was chaos. But during those first weeks of September, the people responsible insisted that postponement was out of the question. They argued that teething troubles were inevitable (“implementing a complex IT project is never without its challenges” and “even a minor technical glitch can have major consequences”) and that everyone involved had “worked their socks off”, especially staff in the faculty education offices – the very people who had long warned that trouble was coming. No heads would roll, then-rector Gerard Mols told Observant.
Insufficiently tested
But when things were still going wrong a full month later, in early October 2009, the tone changed. At a University Council meeting, André Postema – the Executive Board member ultimately responsible for MUSL’s implementation – took the blame before the official evaluation was even in: “The system was insufficiently tested, staff training was inadequate, and too little attention was paid to how everything was interconnected.” People questioned his decision earlier that year to leave for a two-month management course in the US. And where was the Chief Information Officer, UM’s top IT person, while all this was happening? Shouldn’t the CIO have stepped in as the problems piled up, instead of leaving everything to the project leader? Talk started circulating about whether heads might have to roll after all, with Postema and the CIO at the top of the list.
Damning conclusion
A few months later, two external consultants presented a damning conclusion: the MUSL project had been pushed through far too quickly. As Observant put it at the time, it was like a runaway bus, losing more and more passengers along the way and arriving at its final stop empty, having lost all support. According to the consultants, the people directly involved in the faculties had barely been consulted. “They had no idea what was coming at them.” UM, they added, suffered from an “unhealthy enthusiasm for IT”, trying to bring together all kinds of systems – from SAP to the Syllabus + scheduling software – and various smaller programs. The Executive Board’s claim that MUSL would save the university millions was dismissed as nonsense. “In projects like this, that’s often just a line to win people over. But the goal should be quality, not efficiency gains.”
One year and millions of euros later (the project had originally been budgeted at around five million euros; after the chaotic launch and extra staffing costs, estimates doubled to ten million), the worst seemed to be over. No more queues, no more panicked emails.