University of Michigan - Student Life | Digital Strategy
The Division of Student Life (SL) at the University of Michigan (U-M) plays a pivotal role in shaping a transformative student experience at the university. With a mission to promote student learning and development, foster well-being, and nurture an inclusive and equitable campus environment, the division serves as a cornerstone of the university.
The Problem: How to Sensibly Maintain a Large Digital Footprint
The size of Student Life’s digital landscape and the number of units and programs that it needs to maintain poses a formidable challenge to plan for. Many units and programs with older websites recognized the need for new sites, with updated templates, modern design, and improved content management systems. As a result, Student Life saw the need for a strategic plan that accounted for its diverse constituencies and provided direction for updating its digital footprint.
Before redeveloping any new websites, leaders of Student Life recognized that the whole undertaking requires careful planning, and will eventually require a comprehensive needs assessment, solid information architecture, a migration plan to account for technology updates, and alignment across division-wide leaders in order to coordinate resources. Seeing the degree of change management necessary to accomplish all this, Student Life thought it important to engage with stakeholders to communicate the vision for change and determine the scope of the work required. This involved assessing the content on 100 different websites and engaging with dozens of stakeholders from all the groups which itself was a significant task requiring resources, discipline, and expertise. U-M was familiar with TUG’s work from previous engagements and so they reached out to explore what a new engagement would look like.
The Solution: A Program Charter for Change
The goal of the this project was to gain shared clarity and strategic alignment around several key questions to serve as a program charter for change:
Why are we talking about change now? What is the vision for change?.
What are we talking about? What is the current state of the digital footprint and what forces are most important to focus on strategically?
Who does this affect? Understand the user context and site-management styles, including similarities and differences across the digital properties
What does success look like? Understand how stakeholders will measure the success of this effort and how they want to balance tension and prioritize change.
The final deliverable was a Roadmap Workshop to help the Student Life team plan for a sustainable, efficient, and smart approach to improving the digital environment of the Student Life division, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience.
How We Succeeded: A Unified Vision based on Three Models and Stakeholder Research
Developing a strategic perspective required gathering input from stakeholders representing all 26 units, as well as senior leadership of Student Life, with the primary goal of understanding what success looks like from their perspective. We conducted 29 interviews with 60 individual participants. Participants ranged from unit and division leaders to marketing and communications staff.
To help align such a large group of people, we worked on developing maps and models of their current state that focus on important dimensions across the unit . Our research pointed to three (3) key dimensions that tied their work together: site management, funding model, and topic. Site management included how units managed changes to their digital places. The funding model was a primary constraint to a unit’s ability to manage content and make changes. Finally, we identified ten major topical themes across the grouping of sites. We mapped the current state for each of these dimensions separately and created a diagram that merged all three overlays so they could be visualized together in one place. Figure 1 shows the topical based map.
Another important dimension that emerged from our research was the importance of the relationship between units and the division as a whole. Units wanted to deepen their relationships with other units to support a collaborative approach to serving students through the entirety of the digital experience.
We were able to help get them started on fostering these relationships when we gathered 32 representatives from across the division and led them through our In/Tension Modeling Workshop. The goal of this workshop is to help teams develop a shared language for talking about their problem space and to prioritize and balance strategic considerations. Our interviews helped us identify five strategic tensions between good things. (See Figure 2 below).
There is no right or wrong answer on how to balance these considerations, but for one reason or another they set up competing demands, so it is important to decide strategically how to balance between them. So with everybody gathered together in a room at the Michigan Union we walked them through two rounds of voting. The first round asked how each tension is balanced today from their perspective. We then led a discussion around the result of each vote. As you can see, the votes were spread across a wide spectrum. With a group this large and diverse it was not surprising to see such a spread, but it made the discussion of results all the more valuable. The group was gaining a more holistic perspective of the problem domain.
We then asked everybody to vote on where they think the balance should be in the future. Again, no right or wrong answer so voting one way isn’t a vote against the other way. Both will still be important. The issue is one of emphasis and change relative to the status quo today. Overall the discussions revealed a diverse range of perceptions of the current state and perspectives around how things ought to be. Participants were able to broaden their understanding and learn about the similarities and differences that they had with each other.
The In/Tension Modeling workshop and previous interviews revealed seven key strategic objectives across the units. To bring closure to the project, TUG facilitated a Roadmap Workshop with the Student Life team leading this project and prioritized work against the seven objectives.. The resulting map provided a foundation for aligning stakeholders. U-M then used this map to create their roadmap and provide direction to their teams.
Epilogue
In our project closeout with the client they communicated that everything went really well. They had come to us based on past experience and trusted our ability to apply a disciplined planning process that effectively engaged with a large group of stakeholders. Closing comments from the SL team was that the engagement was, “overall a positive experience consistent with what I expected from TUG initially.”
Often our work at TUG doesn’t materialize into something concrete until after we have concluded our engagement. Roadmaps need to be worked through. Developers and systems architects need to take blueprints and build the things we helped design. In the long run, a good indicator of how well we did is the resiliency of the information architecture work we delivered. For example, over ten years after the new site launched, the IA for hr.umich.edu, serving the U-M Human Resources community, still accommodates their evolving world. U-M Student Life can expect similar results as they now start down the path they identified in the roadmap exercise we facilitated with them. Time will tell, but for clients who execute on the work TUG does, that work consistently stands the test of time as past clients often remind us.
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