You face a very particular set of challenges when it comes to your website and digital projects - and in Higher Education, we find they’re often quite different from those in other sectors.
- Juggling diverse needs:Your website needs to welcome students, professors, alumni, donors - and more! Each audience wants something different, and balancing those varied needs can be tricky.
- Managing lots of content: Your website is probably packed with information - from course details to event calendars and scholarly articles. Organising this content and making it easy to find is no mean feat.
- Staying accessible and compliant: In your sector, there are strict rules around website accessibility, and you need to meet all the requirements.
- Keeping data safe: You may handle a ton of personal information on the website, and it might even integrate with other systems - and they all need to be secure.
- Dealing with old tech: Your systems might have been around for a while, and integrating sleek new digital tools with those old-school systems might cause a major hiccup!
- Budgeting wisely: Money’s always tight in education, and every penny you spend on your digital project needs to prove its worth. You certainly can’t afford to be surprised with requests for more budget.
- Future-proofing your tech: You need to keep up with fast-evolving technology, and make sure you don’t invest in something that will be outdated in a few years.
Anticipating these challenges make preparing tender requests particularly tricky, and the risk of your project going over budget or not meeting your objectives is very real.
So, how can you reduce the risk of a large, complex digital project?
You break it down into smaller pieces.
Think about a home renovation project, where your architect gives you a cost and a timeline for Phase 1. You know that at the end of it, you’ll get some drawings and a far better idea of what’s involved. You can proceed to the next phase with more confidence, or take those drawings and talk to builders - or even other architects for an alternative view!
We created the Versantus Launch Accelerator with this in mind.
We know that an agile development process provides the greatest outcomes for our clients. It focuses on iteration, feedback and flexibility. So we decided to take these principles into the fact-finding and planning phase of the project to help you better understand all the moving parts - and priorities - of your project.
To de-risk those huge projects, by collaborating with your teams, our technical experts can look into the details, gather insights, form opinions, and at the end of it, present you with initial designs, technical recommendations, costings and more - all the things you need to take you confidently into the next phase.
Get the answers to the pressing questions that threaten to derail your project.
The purpose of the Launch Accelerator is to gather answers and insights into your users, requirements, technology, content, objectives and more. Armed with this information, you can confidently move into the next phase of the project. You’ll be able to use the outputs and assets produced as part of the next RFQ process.
It doesn’t have to follow a specific structure, either. It’s essentially pulling out the fact-finding exercises of a large, complex digital project and formalising it as a separate, initial phase (collaboration is a big part of our company ethos). It dramatically reduces the risk of going over budget, of not meeting stakeholder expectations, of over-running, of running into technical issues… you name it, we can cover it in the Launch Accelerator to set you in good stead for the next phase.
We conducted user testing for Open Access Oxford (OAO) in a Launch Accelerator. With the outcomes of this mini-project, OAO were better informed about the requirements of the project. The Launch Accelerator included:
- Workshops with key stakeholders
- User interview testing scripts
- 24 x recorded user testing sessions
- Playback session, report and recommendations
The Launch Accelerator provided the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh with valuable insights and a defined plan for the next phase of their digital transformation strategy. It included:
- Pre-workshop surveys
- Workshops with internal stakeholders and external user groups
- A review of their personas
- Requirements gathering and prioritisation
- Audits of technology, user behaviour and content
- An information architecture plan
For the Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship, part of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, the Launch Accelerator involved plenty of discovery activities, UX design, stakeholder workshops, visual prototyping, and prioritising requirements. Sophie Crowe, Marketing & Communications Manager at the Skoll Centre, said:
“Versantus have been instrumental in shaping the Skoll Centre’s vision for a new website and have assisted us in developing a comprehensive roadmap to get there.”
Interested in finding out more about our launch accelerator service and how it can help kickstart your digital roadmap? Talk to us here.