Aaah! The risk analysis. When writing the bid for the project, we quickly totted up the number of sub-domains we have at the university and it came to 600. I couldn’t believe it.  It became quite clear that the long-term risks of not undertaking this project far outweigh any risks internal to the project. We have sufficient skills and experience among team members to undertake each of the deliverables, although we know that the consultation processes may introduce unanticipated risks to the project. As always, there is a minor risk that team members may be absent during the project due to illness, but this will be mitigated by close collaboration on work packages and sharing of responsibilities. The project has support from the most senior level of university management.

Our original proposal was born out of lessons learned from the Learning Landscape project and also out of necessity. We are committed to developing and improving our virtual research, teaching and learning environment and see our work on identifiers as fundamental and integral to this commitment. The project is also timely and will feed into a wider review of our websites and services.

In terms of how we intend to ensure that the project will be a success, we’ll engage in a number of ways to communicate with stakeholders throughout the project (blog, Twitter, conferences, poster, case studies) so as to ensure that our work is widely known, understood and supported. We’ll also demonstrate the value of identifiers to all stakeholders, in terms of how they express our virtual learning landscape, improve the effectiveness of communication across the university and contribute to a more efficient use (and re-use) of data.