Delivering sophisticated transformation in education

We were engaged by one of the nation’s leading qualification awarding organisations to help them define, mobilise, and deliver an ambitious digital transformation programme that would drive market disruption, commercial growth, and social impact.

To help them reinvent their organisation, we:

• Worked with our client’s CEO to finalise the top-line strategy for the organisation, including the market assumptions on which the strategy should be explicitly predicated, the scale of the ambition, priorities for disruption and innovation, and their product roadmap.
• Helped our client to establish robust, streamlined, and data-driven internal governance and performance reporting arrangements, through which they could maintain a regular, open, and supportive view of core business activity running alongside the transformation.
• Led the development of a comprehensive business case, consistent with HM Treasury ‘green book’ requirements, to secure more than £18m of board investment in the resources, data and digital development, and partnership activity required to deliver the change.
• Established a best practice programme and risk management environment to sit across the transformation effort – including substantial early work to establish the ‘as is’ position in critical business areas; identify and assess risks; and prioritise projects within the programme.
• Worked collaboratively with colleagues to map the capabilities that would be required to realise our client’s overall strategic goals; and then translate them into an operating model, organisational structure, and roadmap for transition.
• Worked intensively with colleagues in agreed business areas to specify and mobilise the full set of individual transformation projects – with focusses ranging from people and change, through customer engagement and expertise, to data, digital, and product.
• Supported the design and implementation of a new assessment innovation function, through which our client would invest more than £1m a year in small, specialist and start-up projects which had the potential to disrupt assessment practice in technical education.
• Supported and challenged client colleagues as they took forward individual transformation projects – providing them with the domain and discipline input they needed to help them reinvent aspect of their model, and the overall organisation.

The programme successfully transformed our client’s core operations, and approach to customer engagement – and began a progress of increasingly radical digital change, which is ongoing. Our client’s operational performance has markedly improved as a direct result.