Student Application & Admin Task Management System
The Problem
Students from around the country must register as temporary students at our university and complete a multi-phase process lasting several months and consisting of complex tasks requiring highly-detailed instructions. Communicating with students over email led to uncertainty and confusion on both ends. Administrators could never be certain of what steps students had completed and what documents had been placed in the mail. Students were constantly writing to ask what their status was and what outstanding tasks remained. This led to hours of redundant effort and wasted time.
Strict data security requirements and limited funding precluded the use of a professional CRM.
The Solution
An in-house database system was developed that allowed each student to log in to our website and exchange personalized information and updates with the program.
The Process
Students create an account online. They then have access to a series of instruction pages, each of which has their individual statuses on the top: a “student status,” which updates as they make online submissions and an “admin status,” which updates when administrators verify their submissions and hard copy documents received through the mail. Students are unable to make updates in future sections when previous sections are incomplete. This insures that they are always paying careful attention to the details, and nothing gets left behind.
Administrators were able to assign general due dates for all students, but also to set individual deadlines for students with special cases. This functionality drastically reduced the number of incomplete/overdue items from the moment it was implemented.
Focus on Agile
As with other projects, not all components were rolled out at the same time. Of course, before any key functionality could be developed, a significant amount of time had to be invested into the login system. From there, some early-stage processes, such as submitting an original paper application were left in place so that more urgent functionalities could be addressed.
The most problematic task, and therefore the first feature built, was the China visa application. This required an entire set of hard-copy items being gathered, documents and checks being filled out, and an entire package being mailed to the program for processing. Without careful attention to detail, these could arrive in an incomplete or unacceptable condition … or sometimes never arrive at all. Turning the visa application process into a step-by-step online process with multiple checkpoints led to much greater accuracy and efficiency. It cut down on administrators’ time dramatically and led to far less anxiety and confusion on the part of the students.
With the most high-value functionality in place, we then turned our attention systematically to other complex tasks that could be released individually. It wasn’t always immediately evident to all students and administrators why we had a hybrid system of hard copy and online tasks. But with clearly segmented and well-designed modules, everyone could quickly see what the value was and why the growing pains would be worthwhile.
This provided a constant momentum that allowed the database to be developed into a fully functioning online tool, as time became available to work on it.