Midwest University: Technology Staff Augmentation

Challenge

This University is comprised of three distinct campuses serving over 65,000 students and 20,000 faculty and administrators.

After the implementation of a new, enterprise-wide human resources system, the University saw a major backlash in user acceptance across all campuses due to the product’s poor interface designs, cumbersome workflows, and issues related to data integrity.

Solution

Starpoint was selected to augment the University’s own task force with a four-person core team consisting of two Business Analysts and two Information Architects. The core team’s objective was to create a set of functional specifications that included new or improved business process flows, transaction process flows, business rules, validation rules, a security model, a routing model, screen mockups, and screen flows.

Using a modified version of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), the core team worked in iterative cycles with over 150 representatives from all three campuses to gain alignment on the requirements of the user community. Components of the project included conducting user interviews, facilitating Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions, designing a detailed functional specification, and developing an HTML prototype that reflected how the redesigned application would function.

With each iterative feedback cycle, the HTML prototype and functional specification were updated, ultimately becoming the basis for the replacement of the system’s entire front-end.