The student journey is marked by diverse experiences, intellectual growth, and needs. As higher education institutions face increasingly high expectations from students, the role of technology is pivotal in enhancing the educational experience and supporting students throughout their journey to have a positive outcome.
'Working with Strive Higher really helped us establish an independent, specialist and informative perspective on the maturity of our student records system. Strive Higher got to grips with the journey we've been on in all its complexity, the progress made to date and our ambitions to create a seamless student and staff experience. From this understanding, they co-created a bespoke maturity model with system users from across all our campuses which was relevant to our context and applicable to our improvement journey. Through the creation of these tools, we have established a roadmap for improvement which prioritises the areas which are most important to us.'
-Taidhgh O'Regan, Product Director
The brief:
Strive Higher were asked to design a maturity assessment to evolve the functionality of a large research-intensive University’s student records system. The purpose was to create a sophisticated assessment of maturity progress to date and inform the prioritisation of future continuous improvement activity.
Our approach:
The project involved partnering with an institutional transformation team to understand the context and staff views. From our initial understanding, we facilitated in-depth 1-2-1 interviews and focus groups to understand the processes users had to perform, and improvements needed for the system to support core institutional processes. From this, we established a maturity framework and student and staff personas to bring to life our recommended changes. We coordinated a large survey to gauge user sentiment regarding system maturity and prioritise impactful improvements.
We performed in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis and created a clear, compelling improvement plan. Key to this was identifying tangible improvements from and for users. Our maturity assessment outputs shaped the continuous improvement approach for the team, including supporting them to identify and communicate tangible improvements through our qualitative staff data.
In project handover phase, we discussed how our recommendations and insights mapped to the future product roadmap. We advised on how enhancements could be made in line with resource limitations to enable other important strategic priorities, including enhancing the student experience to put students at the heart of development.
Outcomes:
Refreshed, evidence-based roadmap for continuous system improvement
Future project mapped to set out student and staff technical requirements against wider student engagement approach
Clear communications and engagement priorities established
Read more about our Education & Student Experience and Transformation & Change service offerings.