Roadmap for UCaaS Success: How to Manage Change and Adoption in Higher Ed

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Adapt to a Changing Higher Education Environment

Today’s higher education students are digital natives who have been online since they were toddlers. They’ve grown up with the expectation that the answer to any question can be found with just a few swipes or strokes of a keypad. They crave connectivity—to the Internet, and to each other. Social media has taught them that pictures, streaming videos, and real-time video chat are as valuable to their day-to-day interactions as the spoken word. They can—and do—connect to anyone, anywhere in the world, with the push of a button or a simple voice command.

When it comes to their higher education environment, they want this same experience—to learn anytime, anywhere, and on any device. They expect a completely different collegiate learning experience than in years past—one fueled by interactive, dynamic technologies that support both in-classroom and virtual learning. They want to use their personal devices to complete assignments, take notes, and connect to the university’s public and private networks. As they strive for balance between classroom, social activities, and work, the flexibility to take classes online, in distance learning arrangements, or part online, part in-person—yet interact with the instructor as if they were in the classroom—is highly desirable.

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Adapt to a Changing Higher Education Environment

Build a Change Management Strategy

Adopt a Proven Framework

Focus on Scenarios, not Services

Embrace Ongoing Changes and Revisit Goals Regularly

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5 Steps to Driving UCaaS Success

Many higher education instructors want the same flexibility and balance—the ability to teach students regardless of whether they are seated in front of them in a classroom or attending virtually via a device in another location. They want the ability to interact with students one-on-one, or in a small group setting, again, regardless of where the students or teachers are located. They seek to bring in experts from around the globe to add to the learning process. And, as they conduct their own research, they want to be able to connect to members of their research teams around the world and share information as if they were standing in the same room.

Much like employees in the workplace, today’s higher education students and educators want better control over their individual higher education experience. This redefining of the traditional higher education experience is driving the consumption of unified communications as a service, or UCaaS, in higher education institutions.

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The Changing Face of Higher Education

Students. Professors. Administrators. Researchers. Each play a key role in a higher education environment where technology is the driving force behind teaching and learning. They each recognize that learning opportunities are no longer bound by a physical campus or classroom. The formats of courses have changed as well, where there are just as many personal and small group learning experiences as there are those held in large lecture halls.

The advent of personal communications devices such as smartphones and tablets, the advent of high-speed networks, and the availability of innovative collaboration technology solutions has opened the path for new opportunities in the higher learning environment. This, of course, is a big cultural and technological shift from even five or 10 years ago—and not everyone is moving at the same pace. Institutional inertia can be a big factor, as instructors and administrators are slower to adapt to change than students. Accustomed to traditional classroom settings and “office hours,” not everyone is on board with the flexibility of being available anytime, anywhere.

Introducing new technology into a higher education institution has to be managed with the same care with which it is introduced into a traditional workplace. The difference: the users of the technology are not just the employees (the educators and administrators), but also the customers (the students). Multiple sets of experiences have to be considered to drive technology—and therefore significant change—across a higher education institution.

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The Importance of Change Management

Unified Communications desires within higher education institutions are typical: Voice, Video, Instant Messaging/Presence, Conferencing, and integration to the applications and workflows students and educators use every day. Individuals, however, tend to default to their preferred method of communications for the majority of their intra- and inter-team interactions—some prefer voice, others email or chat. For others, video conferencing is the nirvana, allowing the sharing of information both in real-time and at the right time for the individual user.

Introducing new technology without a change management strategy can create low user adoption, negating the return on investment that the introduction of new technologies is intended to drive.

As the saying goes, measure twice, cut once. In the case of selecting and deploying UCasS solutions, considering the specific needs of your end users—both your internal employees and students—should be a critical part of the technology selection process. Their feedback is imperative and deploying solutions that don’t match their requirements or meet their standards dooms a project to low adoption. A university’s planning and deployment efforts should be equal to the time spent on user adoption and training.

With today’s cloud-based solutions, the operational expenditure, or “OpEx” model, puts a glaring spotlight on reoccurring services costs. If adoption is low, the justification of these costs can be difficult to explain.

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Determine project stakeholders: who are the sponsors and project teams that will champion this project?1

Define the end-to-end project: Understanding scope, goals and timeline is key to success2

Assess network readiness: Can the network support the services you are trying to deliver? If not, what upgrades need to be made?3

Assess user readiness: What is the plan to drive user acceptance across all user groups, from students to professors to administrators to researchers?

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Deploy and implement: Enact pilot, coexist with existing services and plan upgrade strategy5

Achieve operational excellence: What steps are needed to drive value and sustained operation based on user adoption?6

Higher education institutions need to approach UCaaS adoption based on a proven framework—an end-to-end process that allows them to plan, coexist, and then upgrade when ready. It’s a multistep process:

Adopting a Proven Framework

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Driving User Adoption

But while structure is an important part of the UCasS adoption process, success won’t be found in just selecting and implementing services from a list of menu options. Adoption means focusing on scenarios, not services.

Scenarios such as the following are more common in a higher education environment:

• “How can I work with classmates (or co-workers) on a document?”

• “Half of my class is out with a cold. Should I delay a lesson or forge ahead virtually?”

• “In Alaska, they’re working on a project relevant to ours. How can we connect?”

• “I want to collect feedback from other professors. How can I do that easily?”

• “I need to find an example.”

• “I need to manage all of the feedback on this research document.”

By understanding the specific, real-life scenarios that occur daily in a higher education environment, and driving solutions that match those needs, UCaaS deployments are better poised for success.

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Understanding Stakeholder Personas

Needs are important to assess across the institution, as no two users, or their interests and requirements, are the same. Therefore, their needs for communication and collaboration apps will be different. Developing and evaluating personas and use cases throughout the higher education environment allows you to assess:

• What does a ‘day in the life’ look like for individual user personas?

• What functionality does each require?

• What devices are needed? How is BYOD incorporated?

• What value does a UCaaS solution bring them?

• What are the common use cases across all roles?

Identifying the scenarios in which stakeholders would use UCaaS is critical. Current use cases and scenarios can help create a starting point. A successful journey can begin with “like for like” functionality, leveraging the net new capabilities, or somewhere in between.

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Embracing Change Management

Assessing the organization’s culture as it relates to change is a critical part of the process. Buy-in must come from every part of the organization, from administration to professors and researchers to students. While administration sponsorship is vital to success, champions must be found at every level.

• Engage your marketing and communications teams

• Engage your end-user community for feedback in the decision-making process of productivity and collaboration tools

• Incentivize your end users for change and adoption

• Provide an active feedback loop

Change management is not a one-time event. For the ongoing success of UCaaS adoption, teams should revisit goals regularly and engage with stakeholder groups frequently about emerging challenges and scenarios. By understanding the changing needs of the higher education environment, and creating and implementing a change management framework designed to meet those needs, organizations will be well on the road to successful UCaaS adoption.

Is your higher education institution on the right path to UCaaS Success?

Let Carousel be your guide on your UCaaS journey. From analysis and design to deployment and management, Carousel has decades of end-to-end collaboration expertise supporting multi-vendor integrations and environments. Learn more and talk to a UCaaS solutions expert today.

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