Yesterday I had an excellent day visiting the architecture
team at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UWM). The UWM team was created as long ago as 1995,
following a major reorganisation of IT in the university, so they have had
plenty of time to learn what works and what does not work for UWM.
One of their recent successes is a major initiative to
transform support for their student advisors.
The advisor role is rather like our personal tutor, guiding students on
their choice of courses and helping them when other issues arise. In fact, one of the outcomes of this
architecture work is a web site for UWM students that explains what services
the advisors can offer – see https://advising.wisc.edu/
.
The problem the team set out to address was hugely
complex. There was no co-ordination or
sense of community connecting the advisors in all the different schools,
colleges and departments. Advisors and
students had to deal with as many as 17 different IT systems, most of which
required different login credentials, has different UIs, presented different
versions of the same data, and in general were hard to use. Advisors and students spent most of the
half-hour sessions fighting the IT systems rather than important discussions
about the students’ courses and other issues.
The first step to address the problem was to create an
Advisory Architecture Review Board (AARB) to oversee the programme of
work. This board had to decide strategy,
identify problems and prioritise work.
To aid them, the architecture team worked with them to create a Core
Diagram – a high-level description of the advisor’s activities and the
capabilities needed to support them, on a single page.
Having created this diagram for the advisors, the team
realised they need one for the students’ experience as well. This shared some common tools and added
others that are only used by students.
The AARB then added a heatmap to the core diagram to
illustrate which areas worked and which were broken, along with an assessment
of the impact of each. For example,
training was deemed broken and of major impact, so was assigned a large red
circle. Recording contacts was deemed to
work and of lesser impact, so had a smaller green circle. Similar circles (red/amber/green) were placed
on each activity. The result was a
single page that showed the key activities and which were most in need of work.
This Core Diagram had several benefits. The process of developing the diagram in the
first place helped the AARB and the advisor community at large to share
understanding of advisors’ needs. The
disparate groups could see that they faced many of the same problems and
therefore could work together to address them.
Finally, the addition of the heat map helped them to prioritise their
work, covering non-IT issues such as training as well as IT concerns such as
making data consistent and providing a single-sign-on function. The architecture team did much more as the
programme of work progressed but the core diagram provided an important basis
for the whole programme.
The work has progressed significantly since and has been
very successful. Some of the advisors
are reporting that the entire nature of the advisory sessions with students is
changing: instead of the IT forcing conversation along particular lines, the
advisors and students are now free to explore the issues that matter to them.
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