Education Digital Marketing and Scholarships

Management Platform (EDMSP)

Challenge:

The purpose of the Education Digital Marketing and Scholarships Platform (EDMSP) was to administer, promote, and manage $9.7 million in scholarships for Global Affairs Canada. The previous system was a custom-designed .net system that was causing increased costs, long lead times for changes, and was not meeting the business requirements for the division.

The desired system functionality included: creating, opening, managing/editing, applying for, reviewing, awarding, and closing scholarships, configurations, managing alumni records, and providing data and support for other government departments (Immigration). The system was to also function as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to enable marketing to alumni, prospective students, and faculty

Services Provided:

  1. Service design

  2. Business analysis (requirements gathering)

  3. Project management and training

  4. Technical development on our cloud environment

  5. Manual and automated functional testing

  6. Load (stress) testing and system optimization

Results:

  1. Jumping Elephants worked with the client to design and develop 10 very complex scholarship application interfaces iteratively using Agile methodologies. While the interfaces were complex and the application forms long, Jumping Elephants delivered user-friendly online forms which were rigorously tested for usability, functionality, and speed

  2. Ability to create, test and deploy new scholarships quickly - during the knowledge transfer and training phases, JE demonstrated that business users and the tech team could create a new scholarship in hours or minutes rather than the months that it previously took

  3. The back-end case management system was created on standard Government of Canada technology platforms and reference solutions

  4. Robust implementation of an enterprise-level CRM and case management system through Microsoft MSDynamics that would allow for initiation and fostering of a long-term relationship with students through their user journey

  5. Enterprise Grants and Contributions Solution Platform (EGCS) – the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) reference solution for Grants and Contributions data modeling and workflow

  6. Accommodation for various models of application management including Institutions applying on behalf of students

  7. “Self-serve” capability enabled business users (staff) to modify interfaces and forms where they previously had to involve developers

  8. EDMSP, as architected and delivered, had excellent performance under load (number of concurrent users). The EDMSP application easily supported over 100 concurrent users which was much higher than the expected anticipated load. The average wait time even with 100 concurrent users was less than one second. The system as tested and delivered could easily support over 5 million applications submitted each year

  9. Included robust reporting and executive dashboard to provide data and insights, as well as an approach to better track, categorize and audit funds at all stages in the scholarship process