Oxford Brookes University: Implementing…

Oxford Brookes University is on an ambitious journey to transform its student information management landscape. This is part of the University’s broader plans to enhance digital services to students and staff through wholescale investment in changes to its network, systems, and data environments. The University had identified that its legacy student records system infrastructure would not enable it to deliver effective and seamless services across the applicant and student lifecycle. We worked with the University as a strategic delivery partner to support their team through the change, from procurement and design configuration to the deployment of a new commercial ‘off the shelf’ cloud-hosted solution.

Key successes

A more robust, stable platform on which to develop effective student journey management
Effective reporting and data sharing provided through the new solution
Extensive programme of staff and student training rolled out to support adoption

Creating a successful outcome

To realise its ambition, we supported the University to deliver a new commercial cloud-hosted solution. We enabled them to keep pace to deliver on key programme milestones, whilst ensuring that the programme could adapt around the very real and complex demands of the academic cycle.

Our experts in public procurement, business design, and technical architecture – all within a University environment - were able to provide targeted support to the university’s own programme team.

With a programme of this scale and complexity, success was dependent on being able to operate flexibly right from initial mobilisation, evolving and improving ways of working to best effect. This, combined with a disciplined approach to programme governance and decision-making, has allowed the University to create a robust capability for future development and support of its systems and processes to manage the student lifecycle.

Putting users at the heart of design and change

One of the key success factors for the programme was Oxford Brookes’ commitment to ensuring staff and student users of the technology were involved throughout programme activities across design, testing, technical integration, and change readiness.

We enabled the University’s own team to devise approaches in each of these areas. These were tailored to the unique needs of the programme, and our team provided coaching and guidance to help embed and share knowledge.

The substantial investment made by the programme into its user community has provided the University with a much more in-depth understanding of what its users need, and the basis for effective continuous improvement to servicing students and staff.

Understanding complexity

Moving from an established legacy technical architecture to a fundamentally new landscape required a considered approach to managing this transition, not least to ensure the successful integration of the new solution with other business-critical systems. Our technical experts enabled the University to navigate through this highly complex exercise. At the same time, we supported the University to create an upskilled in-house team capable of continuing to support ongoing integration and technical development into the next ‘business as usual’ phase.

PA were our strategic partner throughout the programme and played a critical part in ensuring the University were ultimately ready for going live with the new functionality. Their core team brought a range of technical skills, were fully embedded into the programme, and worked flexibly and collaboratively with us throughout”

Ryan Flemming Programme Manager