Watermark Faculty Success Reviews & Product Details

Faculty Success is an excellent way to keep up with and maintain work progress. Once I started using it, I got in the habit of entering my achievements along the way. When my report is due each year, I don't have to backtrack because I have kept up with my progress. Whether it is the courses I teach, articles I publish, or new committees I join, FS easily allows me to enter a variety of details required of a typical faculty member. Now that I am an administrator, I can encourage faculty to use it in the same manner and I can easily access the work of the faculty. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The linear nature of the workflow can be a bit frustrating but I have adjusted to it over time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1) Consistent CV reports;

2) Ease of generating custom reports;

3) Fingertip access to scholarly activity data for all of our faculty Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1) At times, our configuration platform feels like a poor fit to our needs - as an example, due a change in a required CV report, we now need to include tables that are hard to develop using the data from the fields we have set up;

2) Consistent data entry - some of our faculty enter their own data, while for many, their administrative assistant has proxy access. We do have a guideline for entering data. It's evolved over time as we've learned some of the strengths and limitations of the database, which has required moving some of the original entered data from one screen into another Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I feel Faculty Success does well is it gives the university a way to quickly and accurately retrieve data that may take several requests and many months to collect otherwise. The ability to generate common reports for accreditors is overwhelmingly useful. I also appreciate the web services client to give our faculty members the ability to update their personal information on the public facing website for the university. Customer support is always very helpful and quick to respond. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What does bother me sometimes is the inability to make quick changes to some of our static fields. For instance, it a department changes its name from Journalism and Media to Media & Journalism, I would like to be able to make that change myself instead of submitting a work request. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Watermark is a great tool that allows us to have numerous workflows going at the same time, all faculty have access without needing to bring in paper materials, and reviewers are able to review from wherever they are and not have to review paper materials in person. It also allows faculty to have a space where these reviews and other items are held. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Watermark could be much more user friendly. It is time consuming and frustrating when the workflow needs to go back to a specific level, and it has to go through all levels to get there. It is also really hard, as the adminstrator, not to be able to see at the faculty step, when they have a question. It would be helpful to not be able to edit that step, but at least be able to view it.

Lastly, only having the ability to have one person be able to move steps forward can be difficult if someone is out, and something needs to happen to a dossier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Customer support is usually excellent - only once or twice I had a new rep who advised me poorly/inaccurately, but I was able to go to a more experienced customer support rep who could better assist me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Customer support is great, but there has been some issues with integrating Canvas content into Watermark, and sometimes there is a rep who does not know how to do things. I appreciate that they need to learn, but evaluations are high stakes, and her advising resulted in a pretty large error even though I was really clear with what I needed.

It is difficult to tell the source of integration issues. it but it create a lot of frustration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The system is easy to use in regard to entering data and experiences that support teaching, service, and research.

The fields for narratives and explanations helps to provide important context regarding professional development, shared artifacts, and research activities.

Easy to retrieve information from previous academic years or run reports that span multiple academic years. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Viewing uploaded PDFs can be time consuming if there are many; perhaps te ability to upload and view all documents pertaining to a specifc topic would be beneficial - such a reading an e-book or e-magazine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Watermark makes organization much easier. I have a large number of students that I work with, so keeping track of them all without Watermark services would be difficult, and likely unmanageable. The flow presented by Watermark is good too. It's not too wordy or overly convoluted. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes processing reviews using Watermark services takes a while (up to 24 hours for email updates to be processed). If I am not logged in to the exact screen, then I wouldn't know when someone has been completed or not. I depend on the emails, which can take up to (or in rare cases more than) 24 hours. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Watermark Faculty Success is easy to navigate as the categories and sections appear to be created with our institution in mind. I am also a huge fan of being able to duplicate artifacts as we often do the same things each year (same conference different city, or similar publication just a few details changed). I also like that if I a, thinking about it, I can input details any time of the year- I don't have to waint until 'the reminder email' comes out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think all faculty hate reviews becuase there are too many targets to try and hit (do I focus on research or teaching? How much is too much and is it worth writing down every little thing I do?) I would love to see limits set on institutions, like priorities, as a way to protech faculty from going overboard. For example, I have a colleague who includes their work around the office like "cleans out fridge at end of semester". Yes, this is a sort of service, but the fact that they can get that far into the weeds is a bit of a downer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is aesthetically pleasing in design, with the purple. Allegedly it streamlines the process of submitting promotion and tenure and faculty evaluation paperwork to the appropriate parties, however I have only ever submitted, not received, so personally I don't know mcuh about that, just what I've heard. For example, I send my materials to my supervisor, who can approve & add commentary, and send to an assistant Dean who can then send to a Dean- streamlined. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While it means well to try to be user friendly, the CV import tool is wildly inaccurate and actually wastes more time transferring in multiple of the same items, screwing up dates/titles/etc., and I waste more time manually correcting/deleting/rearranging the poor data transfer than I would spend taking the time to tediously, manually type in everything.

This next complaint is probably my organization's fault in their design/use of Watermark, but there are several layers/levels to input data (e.g. scholarly 1, scholarly 2, scholarly 3) with no additional information or guidance regarding what goes in each subsection. A constructive criticism would be to add help buttons you can hover over for descriptions of what is included in each section.

I also dislike that Watermark separates student evaluation reporting from our annual faculty self evaluation and promotion and tenure sections. As we usually have to include student evals in these sections, it would be nice to connect them to our accounts, rather than me having to download PDFs from one section of watermark, to return to the main screen and select annual faculty evaluation and then have to manually upload to watermark, the PDFs I just downloaded from watermark. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our institution tracks our engagement with the academic and general communities by measuring research productivity and extramural service from year to year. Having a centralized portal for faculty to enter their activities as they go helps us track our growth over time and helps faculty prepare for their tenure and promotion reviews. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The system holds so much information, including items that we don't need to track. It would be helpful to eliminate extraneous fields or at least highlight the most critical ones to make sure that faculty don't get overwhelmed with all of the different screens and data fields. We also wish that it imported course information from Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.