In the summer of 2023, the Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) M365 Power Platform team collaborated with the UNH Provost’s Office and college representatives to standardize the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) process across all academic units. This project transformed manual, paper-based processes that varied across colleges into a fully online and streamlined system. ET&S completed this project by the start of the fall semester of 2023.Â
ET&S modeled the standardized process after the College of Liberal Arts (COLA) SharePoint site. The M365 Power Platform team, in partnership with COLA Associate Dean Jenni Cook, met with representatives from other Dean’s offices to gather requirements and guide the colleges towards this standardized approach. The team built SharePoint sites for each college, incorporating a shared set of terms for tagging files and configuring security and permissions to ensure cases were visible only to the necessary review groups. They also set up forms for P&T representatives at each college to create document sets for file uploads for each faculty member up for promotion or tenure.
The primary task was to create a workflow that began with a Microsoft Form to generate a document set for users to upload files and folders and to create and update metadata for use across the USNH SharePoint tenant. Previously, each college managed its promotion and tenure process differently. The goal was to standardize the submission and navigation of cases, automate and enhance the process and security for all, and create uniformity in document format. COLA’s process served as the model for all.