NCI's new online registration portal, Mancini, has enabled more self-service capabilities for users.
Users can now register, update account details, lodge requests and connect to NCI projects more quickly and efficiently.
Mancini is made up of about 25,000 lines of code and has replaced the old email-intensive registration and approval workflows, giving users more control when managing their projects.
NCI's User Services Manager, Dr Roger Edberg, says the system reduces time spent on administration tasks for users and his team.
"Before Mancini was in operation it would take half a dozen emails back and forth for a user to set up a new project. This was a time consuming process and users are now able to do this without relying on an NCI staff member.
"Mancini saves time for the user services team and the user which allows everyone to focus on more of the technical, scientific questions," Dr Edberg said.
David Houlder, Specialist Computing Systems Programmer at NCI and designer of Mancini, says NCI identified a need to improve the old system and Mancini was created as a result.
"There were three design goals for Mancini; to provide a user-friendly interface where none existed before, to get a sensible data model behind it and to automate many of the manual processes," Houlder said.
The development of Mancini has achieved these goals and the team will continue to improve the system and add new features over the next twelve months.
The next feature release for Mancini will include a mechanism to handle forgotten passwords.
"Instead of sending an email to the help desk when you forget your password there will be a feature that will allow you to securely reset their password quickly at any time of the day, without relying on the help desk."
While Mancini has streamlined a lot of the day-to-day project and user management, development is far from finished.
"At this stage it doesn't allow users to manage allocations or quotas but down the track we're hoping that Mancini will enable scheme administrators to manage allocations and shuffle resources between their schemes and projects using something similar to an internet banking interface."
The portal has been in operation for six months and will continue to improve services on offer for NCI's users and partners.
