Ellucian Degree Works™ is a comprehensive academic advising student education planner, transfer articulator, and a very powerful degree audit solution that helps students and their advisors in schools and colleges, successfully negotiate within the frameworks of the institution’s curriculum requirements. The platform helps students to reduce the chances of taking courses they don’t need and more likely to stay on a direct path to graduation enabling student success. Degree Works is a platform that not only complements other Ellucian offerings like the student information system powerhouse Banner® but can also be easily integrated with any other third party vendor or homegrown student information systems.
Ellucian Degree Works™ has been around for +25 years and has been serving over 600+ clients round the world.
My Role: As a product and design lead, I worked closely with the stakeholders, to help in realigning the product vision for the next generation of Degree Works™.
Goal: Reimagine the Degree Works™ platform to power the experience of next generation students and business users. Strategy, Product vision, Design,
Reimagined Degree Works
Strategic Product Planning & Sprint 0
I spent a couple weeks before we kicked off Sprint 1 focused on Product Planning, in order to strategize, plan, and prepare the Degree Works™ product team for Sprint 1. My responsibilities as a product and design lead, were extraordinary in shaping the future direction of the Degree Works™ platform. We created a product vision to help solidify the high-level product assumptions, its current limitations, compliance to WCAG standards etc..
These assumptions and inferences were based on the outcome of the extensive research based interactive workshops both with the stakeholders and SMEs at Ellucian and the end users which included directors, advisors, business users and students from various Universities and institutions around the world. A continuous research and discovery methodology was put in process where a group of end users from universities collectively known as Developmental partner groups (DPG) along with Ellucian SME’s and executives helped us in additional discovery and testing of designs, providing guidance for the strategic product planning and delivery process along the journey.
These assumptions and inferences were based on the outcome of the extensive research based interactive workshops both with the stakeholders and SMEs at Ellucian and the end users which included directors, advisors, business users and students from various Universities and institutions around the world. A continuous research and discovery methodology was put in process where a group of end users from universities collectively known as Developmental partner groups (DPG) along with Ellucian SME’s and executives helped us in additional discovery and testing of designs, providing guidance for the strategic product planning and delivery process along the journey.
Next, It was time to focus on developing key deliverables and a plan to execute design:
Product and design strategy (bundling this from our discovery and workshop sessions from sprint 0)
Business case (In collaboration with the product team)
Key product indicators (KPI’s) (What would be the bench mark for the product to be successful and meet end user needs including improving SUS (System usability scale) and NPS (Net promoter scores) )
Product roadmap (Phased release and planning including gamification, AI and predictive analysis)
This helped us be fully prepared moving into Sprint 0 with the entire rockstar DW team, we spent the first day immerse into the product vision and strategy which helped the team more inspired. With an empowered and inspired team there is always lot of energy around to get the ball rolling. We had created user personas and initial wireframes to drive the designs that would set the product vision into reality!
