Attracting and enrolling the best candidates is a challenge faced by many universities, and the majority of students ultimately base their decision of where to apply on which university offers the best student experience.
Students are now commonly viewed as customers and they bring funding - so it is important to ensure that they receive the best possible experience throughout their degree programme. Keeping your students happy is key for your university’s reputation and for ensuring that you continue to attract the best talent.
This article will explain how taking a business process management approach can ensure an excellent quality of experience for your students.
Where to start with a Business Process Management (BPM) approach for your University
The first step is to identify your university’s end-to-end processes for which the student is the end-user. Universities have many different departments with processes that interlink, and it is often in the interface between departments where problems occur.
It is essential to capture exactly what happens at each stage of the process and highlight where departments and faculties overlap. By doing this you will be able to easily identify where the inefficiencies and bottlenecks lie so that they can be changed to improve the quality of your students’ experience. For example:
- The enrolment process - Is this one enrolment communicated multiple times, or multiple enrolments?
- Applying for student accommodation - Is there one application process, for multiple accommodation options, or are multiple applications required?
- Submitting coursework - Is there an online process which is pre-populated with saved data? Or does the process start again from scratch every time?
At Triaster, we believe that the best way to identify these student processes is to capture and present them in the form of a process map.
In its simplest form, a process map is a visual representation of the steps each department in your institution takes to transform its inputs into outputs.
Here’s an example of one of the University of Winchester’s process maps explaining how their students can apply for various permits. Note that the process is the same each time.
Once the end-to-end process has been mapped, it will be clear where improvements can be made, and you can begin to put a plan in place to make informed changes based on real evidence.
As part of their Continuous Improvement programme, the University of Winchester improved their enrolment process so that instead of it taking four days for each student to enrol, it now takes only 25 minutes for each student.
Transforming your university’s processes to make them easier for your students to understand and follow, will in itself greatly improve their experience at university, and we’ll explain how this can be achieved next.
How can we make following University processes easy for our students?
Triaster believe that the best way to make finding and following your university’s processes easy for your students is to house your processes online, on your university’s intranet for example, so that they can be easily accessed and followed by your students.
At Triaster, we call these online stores Process Libraries, and they form part of a dedicated business process management system. To see a live, interactive example, please click here.
A key benefit of these platforms is that you are able to store associated forms and documentation with relevant processes so that everything is in the same place. Excellent search and good design ensure that once accessed, the information is easy to find and follow.
The University of Winchester has created a dedicated site for their students where they can quickly and easily find the information and documents they need. Their ‘How do I?’ library has greatly improved the quality of the student experience by providing clarity of student processes and making their student journey as straightforward as possible.
To learn more about Process Libraries and how they can be used to share processes in your university, read our article: How to share your process maps in an interactive and engaging way
What are the benefits of taking a Business Process Management approach in Universities?
There are many benefits that come with taking a BPM approach in your university, especially once you have a clear idea of what processes exist in the different departments and how they interact. As mentioned above, once you have a clear overview of all your faculties’ processes, you can begin to analyse them to discover the areas that need improvement and set a plan in motion to start making the changes based on data-driven evidence. If done well, this will help to greatly improve your students’ experience during their studies.
Some other benefits include:
- Creating a ‘one-stop-shop’ for your university’s processes, procedures and documents
- Identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies so that process improvements can be made
- Making sure that all students and staff are carrying out the processes in the same way
- Helping universities to be compliant with the revised operating model of quality assessment published this year by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)
For more information on that final point, please read our article: Revised HEFCE Operating Model for Quality Assessment: Using a BPM Approach for Compliance
We hope that you have found this article helpful. Here at Triaster, we offer a dedicated business process management system that can be used to intelligently house all of your university’s processes, procedures, policies, forms and documentation in an easy to understand, easy to use secure website.
If you are interested in exploring how Triaster can help you improve the quality of your students’ experience by taking a BPM approach, we would love to hear from you.
If you would like a real life example of how one university has used the Triaster Platform to improve their students’ experience, download our case study: Winchester’s Journey, Excellence to Lean and find out how they jumped 27 places in the national student satisfaction survey.
Related articles:
How to share your process maps in an interactive and engaging way
Revised HEFCE Operating Model for Quality Assessment: Using a BPM Approach for Compliance
How do Universities approach Process Mapping & Process Improvement projects?