Update from the RCGP Portfolio team and FourteenFish
The end of a busy period and a thank you!
In the last 4 months, we have successfully migrated over 50,000 users and 14 million entries from the old TeP to the new Trainee Portfolio at FourteenFish. This has been done whilst simultaneously designing, implementing and supporting a brand new assessment (the RCA) to allow thousands of trainees to qualify during unprecedented times.
During the migration process, the portfolio has also continued to evolve offering new features such as all new WPBA, including Leadership MSF, QIP and Interim ESR. You can read more about the recent updates in the section below.
We are very proud of what has been achieved so far and this is just the beginning, we will continue to develop and improve these systems as we go. It’s important to celebrate our successes but at this point we also want to say a big thank you for your continued patience as we deal with a challenging period for our support teams.
Our challenges following migrations
There is never a ‘good’ time to move to a new system and it will always involve a level of data tidying. When we set out to launch the new Trainee Portfolio, we did not envisage it happening during a pandemic, and whilst you may question why we still went ahead, we were constrained by having to move to the new curriculum as well as the urgent need to decommission the old ePortfolio, which was nearing its end of life. Overall our aim was to try and reduce the work for everyone involved by making the system more intuitive for all users and providing more self-service options.
Since August our biggest challenge has been answering your questions via the FourteenFish support desk. We modelled the level of support needed based on the pilot with the Wessex Deanery, but in hindsight we failed to adequately take into account the variations between deaneries, and the large variation in the quality of data in the old ePortfolio. The combination of those factors, the introduction of the RCA, and the reduction in “knowledge sharing” due to remote working have meant a huge increase in those requesting support. This went beyond our predictions, which has meant a delay in our responses.
FourteenFish have addressed this by recruiting more staff, and as their new members of staff are progressing through their training, the wait time on support requests is now reducing. We have also found that a lot of the support queries should easily be resolved by the individual themselves so we have created a library of help articles and FAQs to try and aid this. We are also getting a lot of questions directed to support which would historically have gone to patch or deanery teams. Please note your local patch office or deanery administration team is responsible for creating supervisor accounts, adding trainee’s placement information, editing dates, and linking the trainees to supervisors. If you have any of these issues, please contact your local patch office or deanery administration team. If you do not know your local patch or deanery contact information then we are adding a link to this information in the portfolio where it lists your deanery. These organisations will soon be updating this information so it may not be present yet.
Self Help & Support Resources
We want our support to be as quick and as helpful as possible without overloading our support team, to that end we are keen to highlight other sources of help that can be utilised for some of your queries - please always check our help/FAQ resources before logging an issue with our support team:
Naturally, where you believe there is an IT issue we are very keen to help with this as soon as possible, and rest assured we continue to prioritise queries where the ARCP team is involved and those where trainees are nearing CCT.
Dr Jonathan Rial
Clinical Lead for Portfolio Development
On behalf of the RCGP Portfolio team and FourteenFish
System updates
This section lists the recent changes implemented in the Trainee Portfolio.
New
- Deanery/training programme administrators can now add contact details for their organisations. Contact details will be displayed to trainees and supervisors within the portfolio.
Changed
- We've made improvements to review periods. If the review period has been signed off, but the end date is in the future, the system will now prompt the user to match this with the date of the ESR. We've also made it easier to set up the next review period and added some restrictions to prevent users from creating duplicate open review periods.
Previous release notes