Dietrich College Advancement

Process

This project was completed during the consulting capstone course for the Information Systems major at Carnegie Mellon. The course pairs teams of students with partners from the surrounding community and provides the opportunity to resolve a real-world business problem. The tangible outcomes of the project are secondary to the course goals of practicing professional communication, fostering effective teamwork, and ensuring a smooth project handoff to the client so that your solution can have a lasting impact.

An essential step to ensure our solution will be sustained by the client.

Before jumping into a solution, our team set out to understand the goals and capabilities of our client in the Dietrich College. This involved interviwing our partner to learn the different staff roles, technology infrastructure, communication methods, and business systems that existed within their team. This revealed two primary opportunities for improvement:

1. Poor Communication with External Partners - Dietrich College lacked a centralized online resource where partners could learn more about opportunities to engage within the college. Most partners connected through a separate university department where the College did not have full control over the information sent to partners. This was the original reason our client seeked consulting assistance, as several peer institutions have a website for this purpose.
2. Manual Information Collection - Dietrich College collected and input data on partners manually into Salesforce, which opened a hole in system security, made it difficult to scale up their outreach efforts, and risked losing information as the data travels through the College. This was an area of improvement our team identified.

Understanding the needs of those who seek help from Dietrich College.

We identified that a website, similar to what peer institutions have implemented, would be the best solution. Our team wanted to set our site apart by conducting extensive user research on our target audience - the extenal community business partners that often partner with the college. Through the help of our client and information gathered in three interviews of existing Dietrich College partners, we noticed three types of partners and built a persona for each: 1) Small business owners, 2) Recruiters at large companies, and 3) Government researchers.

The persona created to imitate a small business owner seeking help from Dietrich

Our team went further in depth into the user journey of the small business owner and modeled their experience across five stages of their interaction with the college. The needs of all stakeholders were condensed into a stakeholder map.

The journey map of a small business owner when interacting with Dietrich.

A model of the stakeholders involved in our project, their needs, and their relationships with one another.

Translating user research into the web interface.

The design of our website didn't stray far from the user research. The pages of the site are curated specifically for each persona we identified. Propose a Capstone Project is for small business owners who would like the assistance of a student team for a semester. Engage Through Research would be for governments or large companies looking to sponsor a research project. Recruit Our Students provides resources for recruiters.

Each page contained two examples of successful partnerships to prove the college's capabilities. There was also a unique contact form connected directly to Salesforce so that partners could immediately express interest in a partnership and their responses would be recorded verbatim. At the bottom of every page is the direct contact info for the college, a comforting element that was well received by our client.

A project will only be as sucessful as its team performs.

The success of our project in the short semester alotted depended on our team's ability to collaborate both with our client and ourselves. We followed a weekly Scrum process and used Jira to manage tasks. The course required us to iterate on a project proposal, peer review each others' work, verbalize and work towards a minimal viable product, and write an executive summary. For a smooth handoff at the end of the semester, we prepared marketing, SEO, and content update plans. Minimal staff training was necessary because our solution fit into Dietrich College's existing tech infrastructure. These processes served as the glue that kept our project together and allowed the team to work at maximum efficiency. You can view many of them in our final project report below.