Faculty Success Project

Faculty Success Project reached a new milestone with the implementation of the Advisory Committee's feedback to inform navigation, end-user functionality and other important areas of usability. The team is currently configuring the new AFR report in anticipation of the Fall 2025 go-live date! You can review the information session PowerPoint or watch the zoom presentation (Passcode: Q6fEsPj=) from April 14, 2025.

Project Mission

The vision of the Faculty Success Project is to develop a robust system for UMass Amherst faculty to efficiently track their research, teaching, and service efforts. Once entered in Watermark, this organized professional information can be deployed for multiple purposes, including generation of custom CVs, Bio sketches, and public-facing web pages, to better characterize research, teaching, and service activities, and facilitate the annual faculty review. The Faculty Success Project Team will be working with and interviewing a broad array of faculty and staff to outline a process that addresses:  

• Documentation of research, creative activities, teaching, and service
• Curriculum vitae management
• Research networking
• Annual Faculty Review

Guiding Principles

The Faculty Success Team has established the following guiding principles for this project:

• A single point of entry represents an ideal state for the faculty user interface
• Facilitation of faculty research, networking, CV development, scholarly and artistic activity, as well as annual faculty review 
• Faculty to retain control over their public profiles
• Ensure accurate and timely reporting
• Wherever possible, reduce the administrative burden (of both staff and faculty) via processes and systems interface
• Customization to be kept at a minimum to reduce impact on future IT support 
• The implementation process and communication is broad, open, and inclusive 
• Solutions should be agile and responsive to future business needs and requirement

Katharine Bader, Business Architect
Keisha Pendleton, Senior Project Manager

See the full project team and organization.