Improving Access to Technical Assistance Through PaaS

When successful businesses look to diversify their revenue streams and bring their solutions to a broader network, technology products can be a viable answer. Businesses can struggle when navigating the critical service shift from subject matter experts to product owners and developers. To answer this challenge, we bring our technology and digital transformation expertise to bear and work closely with developers to set the strategic path and manage the day-to-day development process. 

Recently, for a higher education consulting client, our team added critical capacity to the development of a technical assistance product by integrating with the team to marshal internal resources, lead project management, and design and execute a strategy for stakeholder management and user adoption.​

Overview

Our client spent five years building a technical assistance model for higher education institutions aiming to create more inclusive policies to serve students. During this time they found a concerning truth: many institutions had minimal access to grant funding for technical assistance and, combined with chronic capacity constraints, lacked the ability to use consultants like our client to change their policies to improve student completion. 

An innovative solution was needed, one that could scale effective technical assistance and add critical capacity to institution teams at an accessible price point for institutions without access to grant funding. 

The Solution

Our client spent the next year building a first-of-its kind technical assistance product. Their product turns institutional change on its head: instead of traditional toolkits with static examples and templates, it is a virtual change management platform that serves as responsive capacity support for busy professionals and facilitates the work for them. 

This allows our client even more flexibility to customize support for institutions, blending high-touch support and self-directed work as well as synchronous and asynchronous efforts in the best way for each institution - leading to more equitable institutional support.

Our Role

Audrain Advising added critical capacity to the development of our client's technical assistance product by integrating with their team to marshal internal resources, lead project management, and design and execute a strategy for stakeholder management, user adoption, and product strategy.​

We expedited this high-value product's move to market by integrating our technical expertise and extensive work in higher education contexts. Our ability to liaise with all critical project stakeholders, through feedback mechanisms such as beta testing, user interviews, and focus groups helped our client deliver a product to universities that lack the funding for equitable access to technical assistance.