Frequently Asked Questions

No, following the switch over to the new system in August 2026, ICIS will no longer be available. Data currently held in ICIS will be migrated to Oracle Fusion Cloud where relevant or will be made accessible in archive format if not.

Reporting is the ability to easily get the required information from the application in the required format. 

We are currently collating reporting requirements from across the organisation. The new system will have pre-built reports that should satisfy business needs. 

We will also be looking at supporting current Power BI reports and multi-source reports.

Core ICIS systems dealing with Finance, Procurement, Expenses, HR, Payroll and Post Award Research are all within scope. Some additional systems such as recruitment and absence management will also be brought into Oracle Fusion Cloud.

Systems within scope of the programme include: ICIS, Talentlink, Teamseer, FreshService and My Imperial Payslips.

Systems outside of the direct scope of the Great Service Programme include: Banner, i360, and Worktribe. However, detailed design work will be carried out to ensure effective integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud and these other systems.

The main system being replaced is ICIS, however some smaller peripheral applications like TeamSeer and TalentLink will also be replaced.

Other applications like Banner, Worktribe and Kinetics will not be replaced and will remain as they are.

All existing applications that are currently integrated with ICIS will continue to be integrated with the new system. These include:

• Banner
• Capita
• Casual Worker
• CID Generator UI
• Cority
• DSS
• IPMS
• KX
• NextJump - Perks At Work
• OB10-Tungsten
• PPMS
• Procure Wizard
• SACS
• SafeZone
• Symplectic
• Targetconnect - JobsLive

The Great Service Programme aims to replace and, where possible, improve integrations with other 3rd party systems replacing numerous outdated and manual integration steps currently in place.

The target is that the new system goes live in August 2026. You can view the stages of the Great Service Programme that lead up to this date on our timeline.

Phase 1 will bring all the essential functionality for Human Capital Management, Payroll, Projects, Grants and Finance including reporting, budgeting and forecasting. 

Phase 2 is for additional modules that are not currently managed in ICIS being incorporated such as Talent Management and Risk Management. 

We are looking at redesigning or optimising all key processes, including:

• Procure to Pay
• Research (Post Award)
• Order-To-Cash/Cash Management
• Record to Report
• Human Resources
• Payroll 

We have a lot of needs to balance from across the University. The new system needs to work holistically and we are working on understanding pain points and functional requirements from multiple sources.

To understand local needs, we have seconded people into the Great Service team from a range of different departments so that they can represent the needs of their areas. During the discovery phase, we contacted all department Directors of Operations to determine who wants to be involved and ensure good representation.

Our team are dedicated to getting this right and we want your feedback on anything that has been missed.

Every requirement, pain point, feedback and action that we have identified through workshops and surveys is logged on Jira, our Project Management tool.

We are currently working on engagement plan for Application Walkthrough and once this begins, we will capture comments and feedback and share that information back to the group.

It is important to understand that not everyone will get everything they want from the new system but we will communicate that clearly and openly with you. 

We have contractual requirements and pain points that we need to address. Beyond that, we will balance the views of our Process Outcome Designers and Subject Matter Experts with what we can do from system perspective. Any compromises that need to be made will go through the Business Design Authority for approval. 

'Direct access' will give staff the ability to update their personal records, book absences, get their payslips and payroll related data and should reduce workloads. 

Effective end user training will be supported by training tools like Oracle Guided Learning and our dedicated training manager who is working on the training needs analysis for end users. 

Do come back to our webpages that will be added to as the programme progresses for the latest information. Members of the team will also be presenting at the Professional Service events over the coming year, as well as other more local network and staff events to keep the community informed. A Sharepoint site will be launched in early 2025 to house more detailed content and training for staff to access.

Should you have any queries do contact us or visit our contact pages to find a relevant team member to approach.

We are currently working with our implementation partner to create a detailed plan for Application Walkthrough and aim to start communicating dates in April.  

For those that were involved in Discovery Workshops, we will ask that you are actively engaged during this phase as we are keen to get your feedback on prototyping.  

For broader engagement we will target topics relevant to users and stakeholders to ensure time commitments are managed and focused.

Application Walkthroughs will be done in three levels:

• Level 1: Process Outcome Designers and Subject Matter Experts involved in discovery workshops will be invited to detailed Application Walkthroughs to see and review the results of draft decisions made during the design phase. 
• Level 2: Members of the Great Service Programme Board and department and division senior leaders will test and validate draft design decisions.
• Level 3: Members of the wider Imperial community will be able to experience the look and feel of the new system with the opportunity to provide feedback.

We have recently approved our training strategy which means we are moving into the planning phase for testing.  Final plans will not emerge for User Acceptance Testing until the Autumn.  Our Test Manager will start to produce initial resource estimates over the summer to support planning for the new year and begin discussions about how this will be managed alongside business as usual.

We want to build on lessons learnt from work that pre-dates this project and the new expertise brought into the team for this programme. Key lessons learnt that are being built on for this work include:

1. Appropriate timescales – The Great Service Programme has already spent multiple years in requirement gathering and process mapping, and now has 18 months to carry out detailed design, user acceptance and system testing, ensuring that design and implementation will not be rushed and will be fit for purpose
2. Appropriate resourcing and user representation – The Great Service Programme has a large team including experienced staff from across the university’s academic and support services teams, who are dedicated full time to the project to ensure that user needs are front and centre in system design.
3. Appropriate operational readiness criteria for ‘go-live’ decision – Reliable functioning of the processes within scope of the Great Service Programme are absolutely essential to Imperial, its staff, and students. As such, we will move forward with the system's launch only once it has been rigorously validated for full operational readiness.

There is no ‘quiet’ period in Imperial’s operations, but in selecting August 2026 for go-live, we will deliver cutover (moving to the new system) at the start of the new financial year and outside of term time, which will help to minimise overall disruption to university processes.

This is the key role of our Change Managers who are working with leadership and teams across the University to support the transition and adoption of new ways of working.  

Right now, our focus is on building understanding of the programme.  As we move into Application Walkthrough, there will be opportunity to see more of what future processes will be like as we refine and finalise our design.

Our Change Managers will also be working during this phase and into the Autumn to understand what it means for the teams they are working with and start to build their local change plans for how their people will be supported.

Formal training will be a core part of our change offer, but we will also be building learning opportunities through engagement, testing and involvement in the Change Network.

Yes, we have proactively engaged with other organisations that are at different stages of the Oracle Fusion Cloud implementation, including Edinburgh University, and will continue to do so throughout our implementation.  We attended an event at Edinburgh University, where we were able to engage with members of their programme team to understand the specific challenges they faced. We have taken several key learnings from these discussions and associated research that are being used to inform how we now work across the programme and deliver the system at Imperial. We also developed contacts at these organisations so that we can continue to engage with them as required throughout the programme.

We carry out regular risk reviews across the programme to keep abreast of potential risks and make sure that we mitigate for them and use our reporting and governance to escalate any risks early.  Part of the challenge is ensuring we know what is going on across the university and we are working hard to raise our profile through engagement so we can pick up on any potential dependencies such as REF return.  With regards to REF specifically, the benefit of having a team drawn from departments, Research Office and central teams across Imperial, is that we have been directly approached by the group leading on this work and will continue to maintain a relationship with the REF group as this programme progresses to align and support this important work.  We are pleased to have Process Outcome Designers on the programme from across the university who have lived experience of how people currently use our system and what is needed moving forward.

Visit our webpages for further details on the team.

We anticipate migrating student payments such as bursaries from payroll into an Accounts Payable Process, and will ensure appropriate testing for this process. Sam McKenney is our Process Outcome Designer representing Student Lifecycle within the Great Service Programme and is actively engaged with other Student Lifecycle workstreams across the university and relevant stakeholder groups to identify where the new system can deliver further improvements to student experience and student facing services and systems.

Process design has begun in earnest from January 2025.  We will be actively engaging with faculties and departments throughout this time via our Departmental Process Outcomes Designers and also our Change team.  This will include Faculty Operating Officers and key leadership such as Departmental Operations Managers or Research Managers.  Prototypes will start to be available from May 2025 and end users (including HR) will be actively engaged in testing from Jan 2026. This aims to give departments time to work out how best to deploy their existing staff to align with new processes. Bespoke training will be provided to different user groups shortly before go-live to ensure training is fresh for users in August 2026. Additional change managers in our team have been recruited to provide support for this work.

View the timeline or get in touch for more detail.

Sam McKenney is our Process Outcome Designer representing Student Lifecycle within the Great Service Programme and the bridge into the Student Lifecycle programme.  As such Sam is already engaged with Registry and other key stakeholders to understand their requirements.   We see this as co-design on the end-to-end process for student finance processes, with some aspects being delivered through the new system and some through other product development, such as Banner and i360.

Stakeholder representatives will also be asked to continue contributing as Subject Matter Experts in the Discovery Phase of the project, where they offer expertise beyond that already held within the Great Service team.

Our current direction of travel is that student payments will move to Oracle Fusion via an accounts payable process.  This is likely to replace payroll for payment on bursaries.  

During the project's next phase (May-Sept 25) we will see how this will work in practice to help us finalise the future process. 

Yes, it will be a similar process. We anticipate that tuition fee invoices will be raised in Banner and will be integrated into Oracle Fusion and the cash management/receipt application will be handled in Oracle Fusion.