Case Study - Sutton Coldfield & Matthew Boulton
Netmania help Sutton Coldfield & Matthew Boulton Colleges to deal with their MIS and finance issues caused by the future merger into Birmingham Metropolitan College.
When two organisations merge it is vital that any changes are carefully managed and involve full consultation with the affected staff. This way any natural resistance can be avoided and users are more likely to feel comfortable with new systems when they are introduced.
Such a scenario was recently faced due to the merger of Sutton Coldfield and Matthew Boulton colleges.
Handling the changes
The need to provide common finance and MIS solutions for the new merged college was paramount and rather than try to tackle the problem directly, the college management decided that a lot of the emotion and issues could be taken out of the project by utilising an external consultant as Sandra Howell, Director of Data for the merged Colleges explained.
“Due to the workload being imposed on us by the merger we realised that it would be of benefit to find someone external who was independent and unbiased. They would be able to guide us through the entire process and help us to come to the right decision.”
Sutton Coldfield College used Capitas Unit-e for MIS and Agresso QLf for finance while Matthew Boulton College used Tribals EBS for MIS and Resource 32000 for finance. The Colleges wanted to take the opportunity offered by the merger to put in place the best solutions possible.
Independent further education specialist
Initially the College contacted two organisations and eventually decided to work with Midlands-based specialist Netmania. “We were impressed with the speed of their response as well as the fact that they obviously understood further education and were quickly able to grasp our objectives”, said Sandra.
Netmania has many years experience of developing and implementing solutions for further education establishments. This combination of skills and the understanding of how academic environments worked proved crucial in the process. Netmania immediately appointed Harvey Baxter to be the consultant for the project. Having previously worked for an academic establishment, Harvey was able to quickly draw up a project plan.
Comprehensive project plan
Harvey drew up a project plan that covered:
- Requirements capture through workshops with end users.
- Desk-based trawl of available systems
- Supplier meetings
- Observation of enrolment process
- Preparing requirements matrix and mapping supplier offerings to it
- Supplier presentations to College
- Report and recommendations
The first task involved organising a number of workshops that included a cross section of management and support staff from across the two colleges. “The aim was to understand exactly what they did and didn’t like with their existing systems as well as understand what they would want out of the new system in an ideal world”, said Harvey.
These workshops involved over 50% of the staff and senior management in areas such as enrolment, examinations and IT support and provided valuable feedback. At the same time it also gave those who were involved a chance to discuss their concerns about the new system and made them realise that their requirements were being listened to and understood.
Supplier presentations
As a result of the workshops and other project plan actions Harvey was able to propose two alternatives for the College to consider for both the MIS and account systems. He then setup a number of supplier presentations and demonstrations at Netmania’s offices so that College staff could see the proposed systems working in an advanced environment.
“This was vital in helping us make our decision”, said Sandra. “We just did not have the time to decide which solutions were the closest match and then brief the suppliers on our requirements to ensure that the demonstrations were relevant to our needs. Harvey took care of all this for us meaning that the time we actually spent on this was very productive.”
