Our Work | Beyond Academics

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Project 1

Re-Designing The Student Experience

A bold President decided to take a sledgehammer to the failing student experience at their school. We were invited in to help design a “frictionless, Amazon-like experience for students.” Here’s what got accomplished in just our first 12 months.

A comprehensive study of the student journey – by mapping every single step of student life at the school. Over 1,000 staff, faculty, and students participated in listening sessions powered by our proprietary ThinkSpace technology.
Identification of 100’s of friction points- ranging from unnecessary holds in the SIS to risky manual processes, and outdated policies – that were costing thousands of new enrollments each year, and documented to be impacting a student’s ability to continue.
Co-creation of new policies, procedures, systems, and structures to replace the friction points that hinder student success. This included streamlining business processes and retraining staff.
Optimization of the SIS to remove barriers and automate tasks that now save thousands of man-hours per year. This included the automation of transfer credit and dual enrollment to dramatically speed up information delivery to students.
Installation of credential automation on a public blockchain platform so that student credentials can be delivered, shared, and verified in seconds with zero chance of human error, or tampering.
Design of a dynamic application process to replace the archaic and intimidating online application for incoming students. The new UI/UX transformation reduced the time to complete the application from over 45 minutes, to under 10 minutes and reduced the number of clicks and decision points for an applicant from over 50 to under 20.

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Project 2

CIO Transition Lab

The incoming CIO of a large institution faced a huge challenge. He was stepping into a role that the previous two CIOs had failed in. The school was in the midst of a Modern Campus implementation, a Salesforce implementation, and several major fixes to the PeopleSoft SIS. In addition, he found himself down 30% in staffing due to the leadership change. The Transition Lab led to:

Clarity on all the active projects along with a prioritized list based on importance and urgency.
An understanding of the political landscape – and how he would navigate it.
An understanding of current human capital constraints, and outsourcing solutions available to bridge the gap.
A roadmap for the first 180 days to “keep the lights on”, while developing a longer-term strategic plan.
Weekly advisory sessions to problem solve, ideate, and offload stressors that would typically hinder progress.

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Project 3

Rolling Out The Institution’s 5-Year Strategic Plan

Most strategic plans are worth the paper they are printed on because they typically sit on a shelf with no activation, momentum, or organization-wide support. To ensure this was not the case for our client, we locked arms with the President and became part of their leadership team to do the following.

Design of a messaging campaign leveraging our ThinkSpace technology to educate staff on the key elements of the strategic plan – and how it impacted them.
Hosting working-group design thinking sessions with senior leaders and volunteer staff to ideate programs and solutions that would make the strategic plan “come alive”. This created significant buy-in from key leaders who began to feel connected to the plan.
Creation of a rapid innovation framework that faculty and staff could use to bring ideas aligned with the strategic plan to market.
Production of print, audio, and video assets to communicate both internally and externally about the strategic plan, and its progress in the first 12 months.
Participating with the President in a roadshow to sell the progress made in the first few months of the strategic plan, and engage staff and faculty to bring new ideas and innovations to the table.

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Project 4

Preparing For A New SIS

In Ivy Plus institution had spent the better of 30 years on a legacy SIS platform and had made the decision to modernize to a new platform. The registrar tasked with leading the project was well aware of the 75% failure rate of ERP/SIS implementations in higher education, and decided to take a different approach to the traditional. She invited Beyond to lead a 10-month process prior to vendor selection to ensure the rest of the journey was a success.

During the 10 month “pre-vendor” process we engaged in:

ThinkSpace sessions across all the colleges to get alignment on project vision and envisioned outcomes.
Developed project vision, mission, values, and manifesto to align all constituents to the common goal of learner-centric modernization.
Designed and deployed a culture of change framework to run the course of the 10+24 month software implementation window.
Worked with functional leaders of each college to identify ERP/SIS functions that can be unified, and which functions need custom processes and technologies.
Identification of the current IT stack, the integrations to SIS/ERP, and opportunity to modernize or sunset those technologies.
Creating a System-of-Systems view of the tech stack to identify nimble technologies that can improve user, student, and staff experience as part of the overall ERP/SIS adoption.
Design and execution of a “Cloud Readiness Roadmap” and all the activities (including modernizing policies and procedures) that need to take place PRIOR to vendor selection.
Design of the project leadership, governance and reporting systems.
Design of the vendor requirements based on the modernized business processes, technology needs, and integration requirements of the “transformed” institution.
Design of the business case for funding the purchase of the new ERP/SIS.
Design of the 24 month roadmap from vendor selection to go-live to meet the institution’s needs – not the vendor’s.

By December 2023, this institution will be ready to enter the ERP/SIS purchase process in control of their destiny – as opposed to most institutions that jump to RFP and vendor selection without having done these mission-critical steps.

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Project 5

Turning Around A Failing Technology Implementation

We’ve been invited to this process on multiple occasions, but this project is fairly indicative of our work.

Hosting alignment calls with vendors, implementation partners, functional leaders, and college staff to find all the failure points.
A deep study of the current project plan to identify gaps, bottlenecks, and missteps.
Design of a new project plan in alignment with all constituents.
Installation of clarified roles, responsibilities, and expectations – with governance to ensure compliance.
In the absence of a business leader to represent the school to the vendor and implementation partner, deploy an interim business leader from our staff to speak on their behalf.
Deploy a project oversight layer led by senior Beyond Academics staff who run weekly cadence meetings and drive project success.
Installation of a dashboard system with escalation capability so that any opposition to project success is quickly identified and resolved.
A commitment that the new project timeline, budget, and outcomes will be delivered with excellence.

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Project 6

Credential Automation

A school with an enrollment of 50,000+ students was experiencing significant and expensive delays in the student journey related to transfer credit, transcript fulfillment, and verification. Our IntelliCampus team deployed to assess the situation to find the institution spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in unnecessary costs tied to outdated policies, procedures, and manual processes. To rectify the situation, and give the school the “Amazon speed” experience students expect, here’s what we set out to do in 8 weeks or less.

Integrate the PeopleSoft system with transfer credit automation software that fully automated the transfer credit process for under $100,000. This took a manual process requiring 1-4 hours of work per student, to a fully automated process that takes less than 5 seconds.
Deploy a public blockchain technology to give each student a digital wallet that houses their transcript credentials – allowing them to share that information with whomever they want, without requiring college staff. The distributed nature of blockchain technology prevents tampering and even protects against human (data entry) errors. This step saved the college $5 per transcript in 3rd party clearinghouse costs and is projected to free up time for 10 FTEs who can be redeployed to other areas of the college where there are staffing shortfalls.
Add features to the technology so that verifiable internship and volunteer work entered into by the student also be part of their digital credentials. This gives the industry a better (and easily verifiable) picture of the applicant.
Facilitate conversations with partner schools within the state (as well as colleges students often transfer to), to create a fully automated pathway for student success. Educating the industry on how to leverage this breakthrough technology for better talent recruitment.

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Project 7

Standing Up A Leadership Academy For Staff

As the great resignation takes its toll on higher education, visionary leaders are recognizing the importance of providing talent with a legitimate pathway for professional development and career advancement.

We were asked to design (from the ground up) a professional development platform and leadership academy for a school with over 3,500 employees. This 12 month-engagement included:

ThinkSpace sessions with staff, faculty, and senior leadership to imagine the most ideal environment for professional development.
Design of the curriculum that would serve the entire staff population – including layered content based on each employee’s level and area of work.
Design of a leadership academy where selected applicants go through a year-round series of in-person experiences designed to build their leadership muscle. Each 1-day experience includes professional speakers, facilitated working groups, ThinkSpace environments, personal development, and memorable social/team building activities.
Gamification of the learning process along with incentives and rewards for participants.
Deploying our HERO Agency staff to design a marketing communications plan, including the design of social media content to promote the programs.
Deliver all event planning resources – from site selection and decor to food & beverage, agenda, and staffing.
Ensure the client’s budget is met while wow-ing participants at every step of the process.

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Project 8

Conducting An Asset Inventory To Drive New Revenue Streams

As enrollment numbers at most colleges face unexpected melt, some leaders are not leaving things to chance, and hoping for a miraculous turnaround. This Chancellor included the pursuit of ancillary revenue streams as a key initiative of their strategic plan. We were asked to help bring in some “outside the box” thinking, and hands-on execution to making that initiative a reality. To accomplish that we:

Hosted ThinkSpace sessions with the executive team to uncover the hard assets and soft assets they were aware of within the institution.
Hosted a series of institution-wide ThinkSpace sessions where staff and faculty could contribute their ideas on assets that could be turned into 1-time or recurring revenue.
Advised the working group assigned to this initiative as they conducted a hard asset inventory (facilities, land, etc).
Led the work to conduct a soft asset inventory (intellectual property, billable services, etc) and deliver a prioritized list of assets to monetize – along with a strategy to do so.
Design of a Rapid Innovation Framework (customized to this institution and its culture) so that staff and faculty had a repeatable pathway to bring monetizable ideas to market.
Work with the CFO’s office to model various scenarios – along with risk/reward analysis for each strategy.
Operate a hybrid Rapid Innovation Center and provide executives in residence, coaching, and intrapreneurship activation/nurturing programming to those bringing ideas to the center. This includes helping each project team design their business model, go-to-market strategy, and business case to present for approval and advancement.