JISC final report template - CETIS Wiki

Contact: Stephen O‘Regan 

Date: April 30 2010 

Final Report 

JISC Final Report 

CRM for Future Skills in Creative Industries in West London 

Joint Information Systems 

Committee www.jisc.ac.uk 

Project Title 

Project Website Address 

Start date: End date: 

Project Cover Sheet 

JISC Grant Funding 05/09 

Relationship Management 

Business and Community Engagement (BCE): Customer 

Relationship Management (CRM) 

Process improvement projects, piloting and extending the 

BCE CRM Self-analysis Framework 

CRM for Future Skills in Creative Industries in West London 

http://crmplansforemployerengagment.ning.com 

1 July 2009 - 30 th April 2010 

Overview Joint project by two London Universities, Roehampton University (RU) 

and Thames Valley University (TVU) focussed on BCE with Creative 

Industries sector of West London, mapping the CRM requirements to 

implement Collaborative Course Design, Workplace Development and 

Knowledge Exchange. 

Aims and Objectives 1. Better connectedness between BCE, central resources and 

functions to enable an enterprise-wide approach to developing and 

maintaining relationships. 

2. Enhance efficiency and generate business value through CRM in 

support of strategic BCE. 

3. Develop the maturity of the consortium universities‘ use of CRM 

from peripheral to tactical, within a cross-boundary institutional 

context. 

Project Methodology The project uses the BCE CRM Self Analysis Framework 

www.nottingham.ac.uk/gradschool/crm 

1. Project Start-Up and Detailed Planning 

2. Needs Analysis of Consortium HEIs 

3. Determine Value Added Activities for Employer-Customers and 

Student-Customers 

4. Determine Current ‗As Is‘ to Future ‗To Be‘ CRM processes 

5. Determine Institutional Readiness for Change 

6. CRM Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

7. Prepare CRM Strategy, System, Cost/Benefit Analysis 

8. Write-up Results, Report and Dissemination 

Anticipated Outputs and TVU Future Skills 

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Final Report 

Outcomes 

Technology/Standards 

Used 

Project Manager & Team 

1. A CRM implementation plan for employer engagement with the 

creative industries. 

2. Plan the integration of the employer facing CRM solution with 

existing ‗core business‘ student facing processes and systems. 

3. Enable further organisational buy-in to the overall objectives of 

Future Skills, particularly within TVU‘s Faculty of Arts that serves the 

Creative Industries sector. 

4. Raise the maturity of the organisation from peripheral to tactical. 

RU Creative Futures 

1. A short-term CRM solution to meet the immediate needs of the 

Creative Futures initiative. 

2. Develop the Creative Futures solution via a CRM implementation 

strategy and plan to be a platform for all short course delivery by the 

University. 

3. Raise the maturity of the institutions use of CRM from peripheral to 

tactical. 

Process Mapping, Business Process Engineering, Information 

Engineering. 

Stephen O‘Regan RU s.oregan@roehampton.ac.uk 

Project Team Devdarshini Mhatre RU 

Dr Demola Obembe RU 

Sarah Hart RU 

Nisha Teemul TVU 

Alistair Gemmill TVU 

Sandra Pennewiss TVU 

Lead Institution Roehampton University 

Project Partners Thames Valley University 

JISC Programme 

Business and Community Engagement (BCE): Customer Relationship 

Management 

JISC Theme(s) 


JISC Programme Manager Simon Whittemore 

JISC Programme Director 

Related Projects 

Document Title FINAL REPORT 

Future Skills for the Design Industry in West London 

www.designskillsnetwork.com 

Authors Stephen O‘Regan Project Manager 

Date 30 th April 2010 

File Name JISC BCE RU TVU Final Report 300410 SOR 2010 

URL http://crmplansforemployerengagment.ning.com 

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Final Report 

Project Document Coversheet 

Table of Contents 

Acknowledgements 

Executive Summary 

Part 1: Background 

Table of Contents 

1.1 Future Skills 

1.2 Creative Futures 

1.3 Creative and Cultural Industries in the UK 

1.4 Creative and Cultural industries in West London 

Part 2: Aims and Objectives 

2.1 Institutional Starting Position 

2.2 RU Objectives 

2.3 TVU Objectives 

2.4 Intangible Objectives 

Part 3: Methodology 

Part 4: Implementation 

4.1 Assumptions 

4.2 Project Phases 1-7 Lessons Learned 

Phase 1 - Project Start-Up and Detailed Planning 

Phase 2 - Needs Analysis of Consortium HEIs 

Phase 3 - Determine Value Added Activities for Employer-Customers and Student-Customers 

Phase 4 - Determine Current ‗As Is‘ and Future ‗To Be‘ Business Processes 

Phase 5 - Determine Institutional Readiness for Change 

Phase 6 - CRM Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

Phase 7 - Prepare CRM Strategy, System, Cost/Benefit Analysis 

Part 5: Outputs and Results 

5.1 HEI Consortium Needs 

5.2 Value added activities for Employer-Customers and Student-Customers 

5.3 ‗As Is‘ and ‗To be‘ Business Processes 

5.4 Functional Descriptions 

5.5 Strategic Information Needs - Subject Areas for BCE 

5.6 Institutional Readiness for Change 

5.7 Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering 

5.8 CRM Strategy and Implementation Plan 

Part 6: Outcomes 

Part 7: Conclusions and Recommendations 

Bibliography 

Appendixes 

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Final Report 

Acknowledgements 

The project team would like to thank: 

Simon Whittemore JISC programme manager for his steadfast support during this project. 

Chris Birch Pro-Vice Chancellor TVU for his internal sponsorship during a time of great change at 

TVU. 

Nisha Teemul TVU for her constant support and practical help in arranging interviews and workshops 

with TVU staff. 

Devdarshini Mhatre for her assistance in performing many of the interviews, analysis and drafting 

some of the main deliverables. 

Also thank-you to all the people who acted as Stakeholders and were interviewed and participated in 

workshops. 

TVU 

1. Prof Chris Birch Deputy Vice Chancellor 

2. Carol Macgillivray Assistant Dean Faculty of Arts 

3. Ian Gibbs Head of Knowledge Transfer and Innovation 

4. Saboohi Famili Head of Future Skills 

5. Nisha Teemul Business Development Broker 

6. Sandra Pennewiss Skills and Enterprise Advisor 

7. John MacDonald Head of Information, Resources and Planning 

8. Lynn Grimes Head of Marketing 

9. Clare Beckett Head of Student Recruitment 

10. Felicity Hamblyn Business Development Broker – Faculty of Arts 

11. Ricky Sonecha Head of e-Marketing 

12. Alastair Gemmill CRM Business Analyst 

13. Shafeen Khan Skills and Enterprise Advisor – Faculty of Arts 

14. Grace Nelson Future Skills Centre Administrator 

15. Barry Lowe Enterprise Fellow – Journalism Faculty of Arts 

16. S. Zagorski-Thomas Senior Lecturer Film Faculty of Arts 

17. Ranjit Sohata Registrar Faculty of Business and Professional Studies 

18. Anthony Clark Enterprise Fellow 

19. Mark Chapman Enterprise Fellow 

20. Lucie Hernandez Lecturer 

21. Dieter Herde Quality Assurance 

22. Amardeep Gill Database Administrator 

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Final Report 

RU 

1. Andy Macheter Pro-Vice Chancellor 

2. Michelle Flinn Project Manager Creative Futures 

3. Paul Sutton Academic Lead Creative Futures 

4. Michael Hall IT Director 

5. Stephen Hughes Research and Business Development Director 

6. Sarah Armstrong Alumni Manager 

7. Sarah Hart CRM Business Analyst 

8. Eleanor Merrick Head of Marketing 

9. Richard Bates Head of Estates and Facilities 

10. Baljit Kaur Finance 

11. Damien Morris Web Team 

12. Caroline Matthews Conferencing 

13. Edward Tunnah Head of Careers 

14. Richard Salter Head of Strategic Planning 

15. Andrew Warburton Strategic Planning & Projects Officer 

16. Clifford Brown Client Database Assistant in RBDO 

17. Jackie Moses Assistant Dean - Enterprise (School of Education) 

18. Julie Powell Business Development Manager in RBDO 

19. Lorraine Butler Marketing and Events Manager (Conference Roehampton) 

20. Rosie Pike Information and Analysis Officer (Student Administration) 

21. Sue Pitt Registry Manager 

22. Emma Davies Senior Registry Officer 

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Final Report 

Introduction 

Executive Summary 

This is a JISC supported joint project by two West London Universities, Roehampton University (RU) 

and Thames Valley University (TVU), to make Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plans to 

implement Business Community Engagement (BCE) in the Creative Industries sector. 

Audience 

This report is aimed at three senior management audiences: 

1. Roehampton University 

2. Thames Valley University 

3. Other universities planning the implementation of CRM for BCE. 

Background 

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has funded strategic projects to deepen 

BCE at both Thames Valley and Roehampton universities. 

TVU‘s Future Skills drives the mission shift that is taking place at TVU. It is the key component in 

delivering TVU‘s ambition to become ‗the number one employer engagement university in the UK‟. 

RU‘s Creative Futures is also a significant milestone in RU‘s evolution of BCE activities. The objective 

is to improve the employability of people and the health of businesses in the Creative Industries sector 

in the London region. 

This project builds directly on another JISC funded BCE project, Future Skills for the Design Industry 

in West London. This project developed well received IT solutions to help implement Lord Leitch‘s 

2006 report „Review of Skills, Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills‟. 

Creative Industries is an important sector of the UK economy, employing some 170,000 people in 

London and the South East. According to the Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Council in their 2004 

report Creating Skills for Success: Strategic Plan 2005-2010, over half a million people work in 

creative and cultural industries, a sector with a history of higher than average employment growth. 

Starting from a peripheral level of maturity, both universities want to use their CRM technology to rollout 

BCE across their organisations and develop new lines of business. 

Project Objective 

Overall to help develop the maturity of the consortium universities‘ use of CRM for BCE from 

peripheral to tactical by achieving: 

1. Better connectedness between BCE, central resources and functions to enable an enterprisewide 

approach to developing and maintaining important customer relationships. 

2. Increased understanding of the interface points between BCE and the Student (Customer) 

Lifecycle. 

3. Much better insight into the organisational change process within institutions that have a 

reputation for being difficult to change. 

4. Development of staff‘s self-confidence to use CRM and to manage the implementation 

project. 

Approach 

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Final Report 

As required by JISC, the project used and evaluated the CRM Self Analysis Framework. As also 

recommended and required by JISC, an equal emphasis was placed on ‗soft‘ factors such as 

managing change, as on the ‗hard‘ factors such as process description and systems specification. 

Institutional needs, knowledge and views on customers, relationships, and customer value were 

gathered through 42 confidential individual interviews. Stakeholders discussed the ‗soft‘ personal and 

organisational barriers and the ‗hard‘ procedural, skills and systems barriers to change. 

Main Project Deliverables 

The following main logical business functions were identified and analysed in this project. 

1. Organisation Management 

2. Business Development 

3. Customer Engagement 

4. Customer Service Delivery – Education 

5. Customer Relationship Management 

6. Product and Service Management – Education 

7. Outsourced Supplier Management - Education Staff and Facilities 

8. Collaborator Partner Management – Education 

9. Franchise Partner Management - Education 

10. Funding Partner Management – Education 

11. Community Partner Management 

12. Financial Management 

The following main data subjects were identified. 

1. Customers 

2. Profiles 

3. Relationships 

4. Activities 

5. Agreements 

6. Products 

7. Service Delivery 

8. Payments 

The following business process maps were developed. 

1. Customer Investigation and Profiling 

2. Customer Engagement - Education 

3. Customer Contacting 

4. Customer Contracting and Order Processing 

5. Customer Service Delivery - Education 



A CRM strategy and implementation plan for each institution was developed. 

Recommendations 

This section is primarily aimed at institutions contemplating deploying CRM solutions for BCE. 

1. No two institutions are the same. Nevertheless, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) can learn a 

considerable amount from their peers and other institutions, including Further Education Colleges 

(FECs) who on the whole far more advanced in the application of CRM to employer-led education and 

training. It is strongly recommended to spend time investigating previous projects and use the skills 

and experience of similar institutions who have implemented a CRM project. Indeed this report is an 

attempt to share relevant experience from two institutions starting from the peripheral stage of 

maturity. 

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Final Report 

2. The terms customer, relationship and customer value can be new terms in an HEI setting. 

Discussion can generate conflicting views. Nevertheless, it is impossible to build new business 

processes to generate customer value until there is a shared understanding and ‗buy-in‘ to the 

language and strategic importance of customer relationships. 

3. Before beginning a CRM implementation, institutions should determine clearly who their new 

customers are, why they must be your customers, how they are going to be served, and the likely 

impact on the institution. This will enable institutions to focus clearly on the customers that really 

matter, narrow the scope of the project and increase the likelihood of a return on investment. 

4. Having a strategic plan that spells out the BCE mission, objectives, strategies and actions is 

essential. CRM has to be led from the top. It cannot be delegated as an operational task to middle 

management. 

5. Because BCE is relatively new, institutions setting out on CRM for BCE should not be surprised if 

the business processes required to select customers and develop value creating relationships do not 

yet exist in their institutions. Paradoxical as it may sound HEIs have an embedded culture of not 

having to consider who it wants to be its customers. 

6. Few HEIs have achieved the strategic implementation of CRM for BCE. Institutions are 

recommended to carefully consider their objectives and ambition for CRM. As this report shows there 

are high, middle and low road CRM strategies for BCE. 

7. ‗Low road‘ BCE strategies would include provision of knowledge transfer, or non accredited short 

courses. Low road strategies do not need a sophisticated CRM system and the organisational impact 

can be minimised by using specialist organisational units set up for the purpose. 

8. ‗High road‘ BCE is Leitch Report style employer-led education and training services. This is likely to 

be the most difficult for HEIs, as it requires the integration of BCE with the traditional core business of 

teaching 18-21 year old full time undergraduate students. 

9. Less can be more. Regardless of the long term ambition, CRM projects should start on a narrow 

front with an experienced and skilled team, with adequate resources supported directly by senior 

management. Any compromise is likely to lead to difficulties. 

10. Do not begin a BCE project with the purchase of a CRM system. A system should one of the last 

things to consider. Have a CRM system there is implement causes the organisation to focus on the 

system and retrofitting institutional needs to the application. 

11. The JISC recommended CRM Self Analysis Framework, while having some good content, should 

be extended to help include non-IT and CRM specialists in the planning process: 

1. Strategic business planning. 

2. High level business information modelling. 

3. Management of change. 

4. Business systems architecture 

12. CRM projects must include training and practice in the above techniques to the project team and 

stakeholders before beginning the CRM project. 

13. Actual customers must be included in the project. This worked very well in the initial project but 

was not achieved on this project. Customers are excellent at cutting through to what is important and 

helping develop a consensus on customer strategy within the institution. 

14. Changing the existing culture is one of the most challenging aspects of implementing customer 

orientated processes. The ‗soft stuff‘ really is the ‗hard stuff‘. HEIs have strongly embedded and 

‗critical‘ cultures where individuals career paths are not aligned with BCE. 

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Final Report 

15. Do not underestimate or underfund the change process. For example, incentives are very 

important .HEIs must address the question of ‗What is in it for me?‘ TVU has been very innovative in 

this respect creating Enterprise and Work Based Learning Fellows at relatively low cost. 

16. To be successful, institutions need complete knowledge and command of the CRM product and 

underlying technology. IT and CRM skills were in short supply in both institutions. 

17. Developing business processes to capture customer feedback should be a priority to develop 

customer orientation. Regardless of stakeholders views on BCE all react to customer feedback. 

18. HEIs should cease persuading academics to share contacts unless they reward this behaviour. 

No organisation should be dependent upon its employees for customer contacts. The Customer 

Engagement function (BCE unit) should take responsibility and generate contacts for the institution, 

coordinate management of customer accounts and deploy staff members to service them. 

19. To achieve strategic levels of change, institutions have to invest in people and must be prepared 

to hire or train: 

1. Professional sales and account managers 

2. Organisational change managers 

3. Business process improvement engineers 

4. Business systems planning, analysis and design engineers 

5. IT staff, especially database administrators, and internal user trainers 

20. Employer related customers have unusual characteristics. Combining students, employers and 

employees in the same customer database is very complicated. It is recommended to capture 

information about BCE related customers separately from the student record system. 

21. There is a very significant role for ‗soft‘ information systems to support BCE, such as Microsoft‘s 

SharePoint. Not all information related to BCE lends itself to being held in highly structured ‗hard‘ 

database tables of individual fields. Current CRM applications are very data orientated and do not 

lend themselves to the softer activities of BCE such as customer profiling analysis, and negotiation 

amongst others. 

Part 1: Background 

A joint project by two West London Universities, Roehampton University (RU) and Thames Valley 

University (TVU) focussed on Business Community Engagement (BCE) with Creative Industries 

sector of West London. The project plans the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with 

business processes and systems to implement employer-led collaborative course design, workplace 

skills development and knowledge exchange. 

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) have funded strategic projects that will 

deepen BCE at both Roehampton and Thames Valley universities. 

Creative Industries is an important sector of the UK economy employing some 170,000 people in 

London and the South East. 

Both institutions want to use their CRM technology to roll-out employer engagement across their 

organisations and develop new lines of business from BCE. 

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Final Report 

1.1 Future Skills 

TVU‘s published strategic objective is to be the foremost employer engagement university in the 

country by 2013, playing a leading role in the world class skills agenda. TVU has been awarded £8m 

by Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to drive forward the UK Government‘s 

world class skills agenda in West London. Called Future Skills, it is the largest project of its kind in the 

UK. Future Skills will provide 360 new Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) students for TVU. 

TVU‘s Future Skills will extend the boundaries of BCE. Under the management of Deputy Vice 

Chancellor Prof Chris Birch, Future Skills drives the mission shift that is taking place at TVU in West 

London. It is the key component in delivering TVU‘s ambition to become ‗the number one employer 

engagement university in the UK‟. Operating at the frontier of BCE, Future Skills is encountering all 

the new 'pain points' experienced by any Higher Education Institution (HEI) pursuing BCE. 

Future Skills is a high visibility initiative at TVU. Its dedicated team of new staff is based out of the top 

floor of a new building - Paragon House. Paragon House was opened by the Queen on 20 th February 

2009. The building is a highly visible part of the West London skyline, all traffic entering London along 

the M4 motorway pass close by. 

Future Skills has introduced CRM technology to TVU for the first time. This project is to develop a 

CRM strategy to implement for BCE, moving TVU‘s CRM maturity from its initial ‗peripheral‘ status to 

the next level of maturity - tactical. 

1.2 Creative Futures 

RU has launched ‗Creative Futures‘ to provide professional development courses to people and 

businesses in the Creative Industries sector in London and the South-East. Supported by HEFCE‘s 

Economic Challenge Investment Fund, (ECIF) Creative Futures will provide some 1,700 training 

places over two years. 

RU‘s Creative Futures initiative, although much smaller and less visible than Future Skills, is also a 

significant milestone in RU‘s evolution of its BCE activities. The objective is to improve the 

employability of people and the health of businesses in the Creative Industries sector in the London 

region. Creative Futures is supported by local businesses and agencies, including the Pearson Group, 

Haymarket Media Group and London First. A key target group for the project will be those less well 

represented in the creative industries including women and members of the black and minority ethnic 

communities. 

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Final Report 

RU has been using CRM technology since 2001. Creative Futures is the first time RU has developed 

and delivered short-term, non-accredited ‗skills‘ training to customers outside the traditional 18-21 

year old undergraduate student market. 

Links to Previous Work 

This project builds directly on the JISC funded Business and Community Engagement (BCE) project 

Future Skills for the Design Industry in West London. This project developed well received IT solutions 

to help implement „Review of Skills, Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills‟, 

published in December 2006 by Lord Leitch. Also aimed at the Creative Industries sector, the project 

directly tested the Leitch Review‘s 11 point implementation approach and answered the following 

questions: 

1. What would a genuinely demand-led system look like for workforce development? 

2. How could employers‘ needs be given top priority in the system given the current situation of 

demand and supply for higher and further education? 

3. What would the new business processes required consist of? 

4. How can Information and Communication Technology (ICT) really help? 

5. What will be the likely impact on higher and further education‘s organisation, human 

resources, business direction, business processes and information systems? 

This project continues the quest for practical solutions to these questions at the heart of the BCE 

agenda. 

1.3 Creative and Cultural Industries in the UK 

Creative and Cultural Industries as defined on the sector skills council web pages www.ccskills.org.uk/ 

includes eight sub-sectors: 

1) Advertising 

2) Crafts 

3) Cultural Heritage 

4) Design 

5) Music 

6) Performing Arts 

7) Literary Arts 

8) Visual Arts 

Since the publication of All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education in 1999, the education and 

skills dimension of the creative and cultural industries policy framework has been high on the UK 

Government‘s agenda. 

According to the Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Council in their 2004 report Creating Skills for 

Success: Strategic Plan 2005-2010, over half a million people work in creative and cultural industries, 

a sector with a history of higher than average employment growth. In London its growth is surpassed 

only by the business and financial services sector. 

The report highlighted a number of challenges facing the sector: 

1. Complex market pressures and a contingent labour force of ‗one-person bands‘ can result in higher 

than average market failures and investment in training being sub-optimal. 

2. Developments in new technology can raise the demand for new skills but it can be difficult for 

individuals to access the right training, as the supply-side and qualifications system are sluggish to 

respond. 

3. Thousands of people take arts, drama, music, design, advertising and creative industry courses 

every year in the hope that it will secure them a well-paid job in the industry. Employers report an 

unacceptably high number of people seeking to work with the wrong skills or unrealistic expectations. 

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Final Report 

4. Management and leadership are regarded as a critical issue in large parts of the sector. 

5. The lack of a diverse workforce in the sector is evidence of wasted talent. 

The importance of the creative and cultural industries sector is further elaborated in a series of recent 

reports including: 

Department of Trade and Industry (2005) Creativity, Design and Business Performance 

HM Treasury (2005) Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building on the UK‟s strengths 

Department for Culture Media and Sport (2008) Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy 

Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills, HM Treasury and Department for Business, 

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (2008) Innovation Nation 

1.4 Creative and Cultural Industries in West London 

Creative and cultural industry employers in West London are of critical importance to the regional 

economy and its identity, as well as being an essential provider of opportunities for future growth that 

benefits a diverse range of employers and employees. West London benefits from an increasingly 

globalised concentration of industry activities. Multi-national creative companies such as Warner Bros 

and the BBC, alongside a strong small and medium sized enterprise (SME) sector with a specialism in 

high growth digital content creation, makes West London a centre for innovation and creative 

development of great importance to the UK economy. 

Part 2: Aims and Objectives 

2.1 Institutional Starting Position 

The overall aim of this project is to assist two HEIs raise their maturity in the use of CRM from 

peripheral to tactical. There are three levels of maturity in the use of CRM: 

1. peripheral – isolated use of CRM in departments or business units to manage customer 

contacts; 

2. tactical – using CRM to inform service delivery and improvement across two or more 

business units/departments; 

3. strategic – using CRM across the institution to help with planning and making better 

informed strategic decisions 

CRM Maturity Starting Position of TVU and RU 

The starting positions of the two universities in June 2009 are summarised in the following diagram. 

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Final Report 

The relative maturity of TVU and RU was assessed using the CRM maturity grid provided as part of 

the CRM Self Analysis Framework. 

All business units across 

the institution use the 

CRM system on a routine 

basis 

BCE unit and some 

business units across the 

university use the CRM 

system on a routine basis 

BCE unit and/or central 

team uses the CRM 

system on a routine basis 

Uptake 

across 

institution's 

business 

units 

Functions / functional 

integration 

RU – CRM History and Current Use 

Peripheral 

BCE relationships 

managed; no/little 

integration with 

other institutional 

systems; multiple 

instance/record of 

customer data 

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Tactical 


managed; 


some other 

institutional 

systems; 

movement 

towards a single 

incidence of 

customer data 

Strategic 


managed; full 


relevant 

institutional 

systems; single 

instance/record of 

customer data 

RU is a collegiate university. During the 1990s student enquiries previously spread across the 

colleges were integrated successfully into one unit using the QL student records system. In 2001 the 

activities of the Enquiries function was further supported with the purchase of what is now called 

Agresso CRM. The aim was to integrate with the student records system to support the holistic 

overview of the entire student life cycle and to streamline student communications. Support for 

student recruitment, admissions, marketing and registry have eliminated inconsistencies and the 

fragmentation of messages. However, while these teams work closely together, they still have 

different views of data ownership, and academic school departments are still holding decentralised 

databases of customers, and communicate independently of the centralised workflow.



Final Report 

The current systems architecture for RU is described below. 

Communicate to 

Customers 

Students 

Enquiries 

Student Portal 

CRM 

ABW Finance 

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Applicants via 

UCAS and 

UKPASS 

QL 

Kinetics 

Online Module 

Selection 

Timetabling 

For BCE the central Business Development and Research Office, the Alumni Office and a number of 

enterprise projects use Agresso CRM. Overall, RU is classified as being at a tactical level of maturity. 

Nevertheless, in respect of BCE the level of maturity was determined to be peripheral. 

TVU – CRM History and Current Use 

Prior to Future Skills TVU had no CRM technology. There is a student records system called Unit 3, 

which provides essential record keeping services, but does not support customer orientated services 

such as student enquiries. Over the summer of 2009 TVU implemented Agresso CRM for student 

enquiries. There was no CRM being used for BCE at the beginning of this project in June 2009. 

Overall, TVU was classified as being at the peripheral level of maturity. 

Overall Project Objectives 

Tangible Objectives 

Develop the maturity of the consortium universities‘ use of CRM for BCE from peripheral to tactical by 

achieving: 

1. Better connectedness between BCE, central resources and functions to enable an enterprise-wide 


2. Generate business value by using CRM to support BCE. 

3. Increased understanding of the interface points between BCE and the Student (Customer) 

Lifecycle. 

Intangible Objectives 

1. Much better insight into the organisational change process within institutions that have a reputation 

for being difficult to change. 

2. Development of staff‘s self-confidence to use CRM and to manage the implementation project. 

3. New organisational structures to embed the process and outputs of this project. 

Specific institutional objectives, agreed with each university‘s Stakeholders during the first phase of 

the project. 

TVU Future Skills Objectives



Final Report 

Develop institutional maturity by establishing a CRM implementation plan for engagement with 

employers within the creative industries sector in West London that achieves: 

1. The integration of employer facing aspects of the CRM solution with the ‗core business‘ of 

processes and systems serving the traditional 18-21 year old student market. 

2. Develop an organisational culture around employer and employee customers. Building 

from the existing ‗contacts‘ culture to one of ‗relationships‘ and ‗customer value‘. 

3. Generate further ‗buy-in‘ and engagement with Future Skills by the Faculty of Arts that 

serves the Creative Industries sector. 

4. Enable the development of other customer facing activities such as knowledge transfer 

services on the same CRM platform. 

RU Creative Futures Objectives 

Develop institutional maturity by establishing a CRM implementation plan for engagement with 

employers within the creative industries sector in London and the South East that: 

1. Specifies a short-term CRM solution to meet the immediate needs of the Creative Futures 

initiative. 

2. Develop a CRM implementation plan for all short course provision at RU. 

3. Integrate short course provision and employer facing activities with the existing ‗core 

business‘ of full time 16-21 years student facing activities. 

4. Develop the organisational culture with a new lexicon of customers, relationships and value 

that is accessible, understandable and embraced by academic staff. 

Part 3: Methodology 

The project uses the BCE CRM Self Analysis Framework www.nottingham.ac.uk/gradschool/crm 

The BCE CRM Self Analysis Framework (the Framework) is included at Appendix A. It consists of the 

following seven sections: 

1. What is CRM? 

2. The needs of HEIs and FECs 

3. Who are your customers? 

4. Where are you now? 

5. Are you ready for change? 

6. Process mapping 

7. Which CRM? 

The CRM Self Analysis Framework was used to make a project plan with the following seven phases: 

. 

1. Project Start-Up and Detailed Planning 

2. Needs Analysis of Consortium HEIs 

3. Determine Value Added Activities for Employer-Customers and Student- 

Customers 

4. Determine Current ‗As Is‘ and Future ‗To Be‘ Business Processes 

5. Determine Institutional Readiness for Change 

6. Business Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

7. Prepare CRM Strategy, System, Cost/Benefit Analysis 

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Part 4: Implementation 

The objectives did not change fundamentally during the course of the project. It was the accuracy of 

the project‘s prior assumptions that had most impact on the eventual outcome of the project. 

4.1 Assumptions 

In September 2009 TVU‘s Future Skills celebrated its first anniversary. 

There was an assumption that Future Skills would have completed all aspects of its initial 

development and that new BCE processes and systems would be in place. It was assumed that the 

Future Skills team would be familiar with the Agresso CRM solution and consequently that they would 

be ready after a year of start-up activities to engage as in CRM strategic planning exercise. 

In reality, throughout the first part of this project, Future Skills remained in ‗start-up‘ mode. Future 

Skills had not used the CRM system by the time of the JISC project. The implementation of Agresso 

CRM began with student recruitment. The first phase was due for implementation by the time the 

majority of new students enrolled to begin their university studies - September 2009. 

Future Skills access to the CRM system, including for training purposes, was severely restricted 

during this period. There were further delays, and as a result Future Skills only gained access to the 

CRM system in December 2009, six months after the start of this CRM planning project. 

The delay made for a less than ideal environment for making a strategic CRM plan for BCE. The 

Future Skills team could not spend as much time as planned working on the CRM strategy. It was at 

times very difficult to delineate short-term implementation of Agresso CRM from the JISC project to 

build a medium to long term plan for CRM. 

Similarly, for RU it was assumed that the Creative Futures project would be a growing user of CRM 

for new customers to the university including some sizeable employers. Relatively early on in this 

project a decision was taken to halt any further use of the Agresso CRM solution, pending the results 

of a strategic review of the implementation of CRM. 

4.2 Project Phases 1-7 Lesson Learned 

1 Project Start-Up and Detailed Planning 

This phase produced the detailed project plan and launched the project. An initial definition and 

description was made of employer-customer and employee student-customer using the previous 

project Future Skills for the Design Industry in West London. This is illustrated below. 

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The scope was defined as, ―creative industries as managed by the Faculty of Arts TVU and the 

School of Arts RU of the collaborating universities.‖ 

The variables that determined the size of the workload were listed, e.g. stakeholders, number of 

interviews, the estimated number of CRM processes to be mapped, etc. Background research on 

CRM best practice in the HEI/FEC sector was conducted by attending an Agresso user group, visiting 

Salford University and two Further Education Colleges (FEC), Swindon College and Ealing, 

Hammersmith and West London College. Other solution vendors were contacted including Microsoft 

Dynamics and Sugar CRM to contribute relevant experience. Despite initial interest neither supplier 

contributed. To determine best practice the project conducted a review of the published literature on 

CRM implementation. The review of CRM best practice is given at Appendix B. 

Also in this phase the project web-site, blog and RSS feeds were set up. 

http://crmplansforemployerengagment.ning.com 

Actual Experience and Lessons Learned 

The number of stakeholders (44 across two institutions) was much larger than anticipated in the 

original plan. Much more effort was expended on interviewing, analysis and synthesis of the results 

than originally planned. Although planned it was not possible to use focus groups to gather 

stakeholder input. It is very difficult to find a common time and place for stakeholders to meet as they 

are spread across the institution at separate locations with teaching and managerial commitments. 

TVU‘s Future Skills offers employer led education and knowledge transfer services. At RU Creative 

Futures offers non-accredited short courses to the employed and unemployed, directly to individual 

persons, in association with employers and also via referrals from community partners such as Job 

Centre. 

In addition, the project looked at other offers that had an employer dimension or were outside the core 

business, including offers made to alumni, placements and short-term employment at employers and 

also conferencing. 

With perhaps the exception of consultancy and conferencing, new products and services are directly 

related to existing process and system design to deliver education to the traditional 18-21 year old 

market segment – students. 

Employer needs are, of course, very different. Nevertheless, employees look pretty much like 

students once they come in contact with HEI business process and systems. 

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Even though RU‘s Creative Futures had major employers such as the Pearson Group backing the 

project, and had a target market of mature employed or unemployed students, the distinguishing 

feature remained the short duration and non-accreditation of the courses of study. Most processing 

looked remarkably similar to core ‗student‘ processing. 

There are four lessons for future projects. 

1. Plan to use individual interviews to gather Stakeholder input. 

2. Appreciate and take into account in your plans the large scope of the term ‗customer‘ 

within an HEI. Remember that when considering employer led education and training, it is 

rarely possible (knowledge transfer being the exception) to separate new BCE initiatives from 

the core business of educating 18-21 year old full-time undergraduates. 

3. Similar projects inspired by the Leitch Review must consider the considerable effort to 

understand the impact on current processes, but moreover, the effort to engage stakeholders 

to consider the needs of employer related students as being different from the vast majority of 

customers. FECs are much more accomplished at developing this perspective. 

4. For HEIs considering CRM for BCE, a viable strategy is to focus exclusively on knowledge 

transfer and consultancy. This will generate potential wins for much less effort and take an 

institution to the tactical level of CRM maturity for BCE. 

Because both TVU and RU used Agresso CRM, there was an assumption that the vendor would have 

a clear incentive to engage with the project, provide training and share best practice. It proved difficult 

to get assistance from the vendor for this project. 

The lessons for HEIs are: 

1. Ensure you have a ‗skills transfer‘ plan to ensure the staff are self-sufficient in CRM 

knowledge. 

2. When selecting CRM vendors adopt a professional vendor selection method. Consider all 

costs, especially, licensing, documentation and training. 

3. Ensure your vendor practises relationship management with its customers. Without a 

demonstrable expertise in CRM, not only will HEIs be disappointed in the service but the 

solution will not reflect basic requirements. 

The project plan assumed that HEI CRM best practice would be readily available directly from other 

HEIs and also from the coordinating project for this first phase. As an alternative the project 

conducted an extensive review of the literature of CRM best practice. The project is convinced many 

of its efforts and some deliverables ‗reinvent the wheel‘ of employer engagement. Consequently, time 

was not available to explore new aspects of BCE, including exploring the link between the almost 

universal part-time employment of students and employer engagement. 

Specific lessons for HEIs following in the footsteps of this project are: 

1. Spend considerable time, up to two months, with the assistance of JISC, analysing 

previous work. 

2. Find a partner institution that was at the same stage as your institution and faced similar 

requirements, and employ them directly on your project. 

Phase 2 Needs Analysis of Consortium HEIs 

In this phase, TVU and RU agreed what the new CRM strategy is to achieve and determined how 

success will be measured. Reflecting its prevailing institutional strategies toward BCE, RU was far 

more cautious than TVU, and wanted this project to establish a common language or lexicon around 

customer. 

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As recommended and required by JISC, a strong emphasis was placed on the ‗soft‘ factors of 

managing change rather than on ‗hard‘ factors of systems specifications, process descriptions and the 

like. The current institutional knowledge and position on customers, relationships, and customer value 

were gathered through 42 confidential individual interviews. Stakeholders discussed the ‗soft‘ 

personal and organisational barriers and the ‗hard‘ procedural, skills and systems barriers to change. 

These are documented using some established models of change management. Stakeholder‘s 

commentary was compared with best practice gathered in Phase 1. Stakeholder needs were collected 

into a Balanced Score Card of financial, customer, learning and process, objectives, measures and 

initiatives to assist the management and control of the CRM implementation plan. 


As mentioned above, it was not possible to use focus groups. A detailed set of questions was 

produced and circulated to most of the stakeholders in advance. The introductory letter and questions 

sent to stakeholders are given at Appendix C. 

The project also took advice from Dr Demola Obembe on current best practice in organisational 

change. Information gathering did not take a direct approach of simply asking for system 

requirements. Stakeholders were guided through a discussion on the key principals of CRM and their 

views on the likely success of either Future Skills or Creative Futures. A number of stakeholders were 

anticipating questions on system requirements and commented that it was an interesting discussion 

that made them think more deeply about relationship management in their institution. 

As there was an incumbent CRM solution, nearly all stakeholders found it difficult to separate the 

business of customer relationship management from the actual IT system. Although most of the 

principal requirements for employer engagement CRM were mentioned, operational staff in particular 

showed a very strong tendency to remain focussed on the CRM IT system. If the system supported it 

then it was viewed as a valid requirement. Operational staff found it especially difficult to see the value 

in having a set of business requirements and processes linked to their business objectives. The 

packaged solution was the ‗de facto‘ solution to their needs. 

It was also apparent that the dominant customer was the student or learner. Many stakeholders didn‘t 

at first mention employers as customers or consider their needs. At RU, with longer experience of 

CRM, it was the IT system that was nearly always deficient rather than people or processes. 

Furthermore, the concept of relationship and customer value were not well understood. 

Lessons for HEIs following on from this project are: 

1. Be prepared to explain and justify the language of CRM. 

2. Requirements discovered by discussing the institutional approach to customers, 

relationships and value worked very successfully and is recommended. 

3. The CRM Self Analysis Framework must be extended to include techniques to help 

stakeholders separate ‗what is required from the ‗how‘ it is done of CRM. 

4. The term ‗CRM‘ is too strongly associated with IT systems, and should be avoided. The 

CRM Self Analysis Framework is not especially helpful in this regard. 

5. The CRM Self Analysis Framework should be extended to include some strategic business 

planning techniques 

6. The CRM Self Analysis Framework should include techniques for management of change. 

Phase 3 Determine Value Added Activities for Employer-Customers and Student-Customers 

The definition and the scope of ‗customer‘ first defined at the beginning of the project was further 

refined. This phase focussed on examining the sources and barriers to customer value. Some simple 

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Business Process Engineering (BPE) techniques were deployed to identify value added and nonvalue 

added activities from the customer‘s perspective. 


The project plan assumed existing customers of both Future Skills and Creative Futures would be 

consulted. The actual experience was that both projects had very few actual employer customers. 

Both institutions were unprepared to expose their few relationships to an ‗internal‘ CRM planning 

project. In this project‘s view this lack of access reflected: 

a) The relative early stage of the projects 

b) A lack of confidence and experience in engaging with customers and 

c) A fear of an outside party communicating with their customers. 

This was in marked contrast to the earlier JISC project where the project team were able to make 

direct contact with a wide variety of companies in the Creative Industries sector. These contacts were 

fundamental to the success of that project. 

Lessons for HEIs following on from this project are: 

1. The concept of customer value must be understood. Without this shared understanding 

the benefits of process mapping and BPE are unlikely to be appreciated. Additional effort is 

required to develop the language of customers, customer value and the role of relationships 

in achieving institutional goals. 

2. Make engaging customers a mandatory requirement of your project. 

3. When institutions are at the peripheral stage or just starting out, as in the case of TVU, do 

not be too surprised if they find it difficult to think strategically. 

Phase 4 Determine Current ‘As Is’ and Future ‘To Be’ Business Processes 

In this phase, the ‗to be‘ future situation of CRM supported BCE processes were mapped at a high 

level against the strategic business objectives agreed in Phase 2. The ‗to be‘ was compared to the ‗as 

is‘ current situation or ‗Where are we now?‘ The new business processes were further analysed by 

comparing with current problems, impediments to change and stakeholder requirements. 


The involvement of two universities with the same objective of engagement with the Creative 

Industries sector proved vital in this phase. At RU a decision was taken to halt any further use of the 

Agresso CRM solution pending the results of this project. This project surfaced the lack of a genuine 

institutional strategy for CRM, and moreover, a lack of internal resources and expertise to support 

Creative Futures. Consequently, the RU analysis was widened and was able to touch upon areas 

outside the original scope including alumni, conferencing, HEFCE reporting, and the like. 

The CRM Self Analysis Framework required further development for this phase. The CRM Self 

Analysis Framework is too low level process orientated. The project found that both universities had 

few in situ business processes for BCE. Future Skills had developed initial processes using the 

experience of a team member who previously worked at a FEC using the Goldmine contact 

management system. In addition, TVU‘s quality assurance team were able to provide detailed 

descriptions of their activities. 

Stakeholders were unable to identify with process descriptions and process mapping. The 

documentation of Agresso CRM is very data orientated and operational staff wanted to talk about 

leads, opportunities, contacts, etc as supported by Agresso CRM. 

To address these issues, the project turned to some information strategic planning techniques first 

developed by IBM in the 1980s. In short, both process and information (data) requirements were 

modelled. The models use hierarchies and decomposition to communicate logical business needs 

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free from technology, current procedures and organisation. The models are designed to be intelligible 

to all levels from senior management, operational staff and also to information systems analysts and 

designers. These techniques were essential for the application of BPE in a subsequent phase of the 

project. These techniques helped discover missing activities, essential to achieving a HEI‘s strategic 

objectives for CRM. 

The interviews were analysed for current and future processes. A number of cross organisational 

workshops proved to be very successful in surfacing gaps between current and desired business 

processes. 

Specific lessons and recommendations for HEIs learned during this phase are: 

1. To enable projects to communicate with stakeholders much more effectively use a modified 

version of the Self Analysis Framework that includes logical modelling of business activities 

spanning both high level functions and low level processes. 

2. Extend the Self Analysis Framework to include the logical modelling of business data 

covering high level subjects such as customers, products, agreements etc, and also low level 

entities such as module. 

3. Employ both top-down (decomposition) and bottom-up (aggregation) techniques and cross 

map business activities to business data requirements. 

4. Provide extensive training to project participants in logical modelling techniques. 

5. Insist on workshops attended by a representative group of the institution‘s organisational 

units such as, senior management, finance, marketing, student administration, facilities 

management, teaching faculties, etc. 

Phase 5 Determine Institutional Readiness for Change 

As planned, the outputs from the previous phase of the project were reviewed and an assessment 

was made of the change management aspects of the project. Drawing on standard organisational 

change techniques, several new deliverables not specified in the Self Analysis Framework were used 

to depict and communicate institutional readiness for change. The framework was extended to use 

formal change management techniques such as John Kotter‘s 8 Step Change Process, and McKinsey 

Consultancy‘s Seven-S Framework. 

Capacity for change was used to determine the scope and ambition of the CRM implementation plan. 


Determining institutional readiness for change was not carried out towards the end of the project. 

Change and capacity for change were high on the agenda right from the start of the project. The 

interviews used for detailed information gathering contained explicit questions about change. The 

responses of the stakeholders provided a good insight into institutional culture, history, skills, 

attitudes, and the like. 

TVU‘s strategic plan was very useful in setting out the strategic agenda and the role of CRM for 

achieving its employer engagement objective. RU is at the end of its current strategic plan it was 

therefore much less relevant in guiding the CRM plan. 

As anticipated, obtaining a consensus on the need and methods for cultural change was very 

challenging. HEIs, especially academic staff, dislike change, preferring continuity and a future not too 

dissimilar from today. 

The current environment is very uncertain, with HEI‘s primary customer, the Government, asking HEIs 

to develop new income streams while simultaneously cutting budgets. Academic staff can be 

unresponsive to calls for change. Academic careers are tied to subject expertise, teaching and 

research, not BCE. There are very few Professorships for BCE? Without the opportunity to achieve 

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the equivalent of professorial status through BCE, and to move to similar positions at other 

institutions, there is a clear disincentive to devoting time to BCE activities. 

TVU has been prepared to be innovative with incentives, appointing Enterprise Fellows and Work 

Based Learning Fellows, and plan professorial level appointments via the BCE route. 

A deviation from the plan as was previously noted is that the project was unable to arrange site visits 

with other HEIs. Outside of one Agresso Users Group the project was unable to find case studies of 

successful ‗change agents‘ in the HEI sector and show exemplary CRM projects to our key 

stakeholders. 

When planning for change in HEIs, it vital to use examples of best practice. For example, TVU has 

highly successful business facing faculties for catering and hospitality, and an enviable reputation for 

relationships with the National Health Service (NHS) and blue-chip companies such as Hewlett 

Packard. RU has a highly skilled bids team and a long standing relationship with the Teacher 

Development Agency. It is these customer relationships which should be the focus of CRM strategy 

and provide the springboard for roll-out of CRM supported BCE across the institution. 

Specific lessons HEIs learned during this phase are: 

1. To be successful, this phase of the CRM planning project requires an institution wide 

strategic plan that makes explicit reference to customers in term of objectives, targets, actions 

and progress or performance measures. This must be communicated before CRM planning 

takes place. An alternative is to modify the strategic plan and add a part that explicitly defines 

customer strategy. 

2. Capacity, readiness for change, and achieving change is very difficult for HEIs. Incentives 

and rewards that answer the question, ‗What is in it for me?‘ must be addressed in this phase. 

3. Preparing and distributing the deliverables of this phase must be handled sensitively. 

Nevertheless, within an open and supportive environment, for dialogue created and led by the 

senior management team it is possible to develop a change management programme to 

implement CRM. 

4. Have a strategic vision, but be prepared to start on a narrow front concentrating on existing 

relationships and backed by more than just sufficient resources. 

Phase 6 CRM Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

The CRM Self Analysis Framework had a small section on BPE. The project adopted a formal BPE 

methodology originally developed by Texas Instruments, the US semi-conductor manufacturer, in 

partnership with Michael Hammer. Process engineering is ‗the fundamental rethinking and radical 

redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures 

of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed‘, Hammer and Champy (1993). 


The application of BPE techniques was not as rigorous as planned. Both TVU‘s Future Skills and 

RU‘s Creative Futures projects were concerned with implementing the urgent day to day aspects of 

their project. As a consequence, there was difficulty in obtaining adequate ‗air-time‘ with stakeholders 

to explore process maps and process engineering. 

For Future Skills there had been long delays in getting access to the Agresso CRM. The Future Skills 

teams were working flat out to develop internal customer relationships to build the cross 

organisational unit processes necessary to deliver employer led education and training. This project 

had to work alongside them to build the CRM plan. 

It was observed that it was much easier for persons engaged in BCE but not yet using the Agresso 

CRM solution to appreciate the need for BPE and process mapping. The team responsible for 

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knowledge transfer consultancy services, although very busy, found it much easier to communicate 

and discuss their needs. 

There was a phenomenon of ‗process dissonance‘, which probably exists in all organisations. 

Dissonance is observed when stakeholders say that their part of a customer process functions well, 

but it is other organisational units, or systems, or other factors which denude process performance. 

Although problem processes were identified elsewhere in the two institutions, it was not possible to 

organise enough cross institutional workshops to map and redesign (engineer) these processes. 

This phase of the project raised an additional scoping issue that was not thought of during the 

planning process. CRM is concerned with supporting a 360 degree view of the customer. CRM 

solutions provide information processing support mainly for data directly related to customer. BPE 

defines the scope of a process from the perspective of a customer. If a customer initiates an activity, 

the scope of the process includes all activities that need to happen to meet the customer‘s needs. 

This is substantially different from CRM which is concerned only with activities and information that 

have direct contact with the customer. 

For TVU‘s Future Skills it was observed early on that one of the most critical business processes to 

reengineer was the design and delivery of new employer led education and training programmes. 

Although this is a result of BCE CRM, it is arguably not within the scope of a CRM planning project. 

Nevertheless, this project has made a process map of this activity because: 

(I) It is the most critical cross institution business process for both universities, and 

(ii) It follows on directly from the previous work Future Skills for the Design Industry in West London 

which describes how to engage employers in collaborative course design to address skills gaps in the 

Creative Industries sector www.designskillsnetwork.com. 

Recommendations for HEIs following on from this project are: 

1. BPE of new business processes should only be carried out: 

a) During a period of relative organisational calm, not when the BCE project is under 

pressure. 

b) With senior and middle managers first, who then work with operational staff to reengineer 

business processes. 

c) Only when the complete cross organisational process has been identified and all 

‗process actors‘ can participate in BPE. 

d) On a limited small scale e.g. scoped for a single type of product, or type of 

customer. 

2. BPE challenges the organisational status quo. Without the organisation being ‗unfrozen‘ 

and prepared for change its insights for improving customer facing business processes are 

unlikely to be implemented. 

3. Overall Assessment of CRM Self Analysis Framework 

CRM Self Analysis Framework is too low level process orientated. 

a) Misses techniques for linking strategy to process and systems. 

b) Confuses process mapping (e.g. cross departmental swim lanes) with BPE – end to end 

business processes regardless of organisational structure. 

c) Seems to ignore data and data structures, when most CRM systems are mainly 

databases. 

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d) Process map deliverables are very time consuming to produce – they never seem to be 

correct. 

e) Need a progressive top down as well as bottom up method, the project ended up taking 

all the decision making boxes out, and working at the higher level. 

Phase 7 Prepare CRM Strategy, System, Cost/Benefit Analysis 

This phase produced an institutional plan to move from the ‗peripheral‘ to ‗tactical‘ level of maturity in 

the use of CRM for BCE. Of course, the implementation plan reflects the findings and 

recommendations of the previous phases of this project. In particular, the assessment of institutional 

readiness for change was used to ensure the plan is realistic. 


As both TVU and RU are current customers of Agresso CRM, there is no need to recommend a CRM 

solution. Instead the functional characteristics of Agresso CRM are compared to the process and data 

requirements. 

Agresso provided an overview of their product, and the project had access to TVU‘s original 

implementation plan. 

Part 5: Outputs and Results 

5.1 HEI Consortium Needs 

Strategic Drivers 

TVU‘s Strategic Plan 

“By 2013, TVU will be the foremost employer engagement university in the country, playing a leading 

role in taking forward the world class skills agenda. Our national and international reputation for the 

quality of our employer- related and work-focussed learning will be built on our reputation as an 

educational provider committed to the integration of all levels of learning. TVU will be a business 

facing organisation with a demand-led portfolio not limited by time, space or mode of study” 

“By 2013, TVU will be one of the leading modern universities specialising in the generation, 

application and transfer of „useful knowledge‟. This will see staff, students and stakeholders working 

together to produce research that is practically relevant and academically rigorous … this approach 

will differentiate ourselves from other institutions” 

TVU Strategic Plan, 2008-2013 

TVU‘s strategic direction and the role of BCE couldn‘t be clearer. The strategic plan is available as a 

public document from TVU‘s web-site. TVU also has a very detailed and specific BCE strategic plan 

entitled the ‗University Enterprise and Employer Engagement Strategy (E3)‘. E3 specifies how TVU is 

to reach a very significant increase in revenue from new BCE related activities. 

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In September 2008, TVU set-up a new Strategic Enterprise and Business Unit (SEBU) backed by 

HEFCE funding called Future Skills to lead the delivery of the BCE aspects of TVU‘s strategic plan. 

This project extracted the BCE and CRM specific aspects of the strategic plan and formulated a BCE 

CRM Balanced Score Card. 

Balanced Scorecard 

Kaplan and Norton (1996) claim that a Balanced Scorecard provides executives with a 

comprehensive framework that translates a company‘s vision and strategy into a coherent set of 

performance measures. 

―The Balanced Scorecard fills the void that exists in most management systems – the lack of a 

systematic process to implement and obtain feedback about strategy‖ 

TVUs Balanced Score Card for BCE is given at Appendix D to this report. 

TVU‘s BCE plan has specific targets and key performance indicators (KPIs), not least the target of 

achieving 360 new Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) students for TVU. There are similar quantified targets 

for the number of KTPs and other sources of new income. 

RU‘s Strategic Plan 

At the time of this project Roehampton University is at the end of its current strategic planning cycle 

(2006-2011), and is in the midst of formulating a new strategic plan. The 2006 plan is general in its 

references to BCE and to CRM, and reflects the strategic imperatives of a relatively new university 

that became independent of Surrey University in August 2004. 

In 2006 RU‘s strategic priorities were to: 

‗Consolidate a sustainable reputation for excellent teaching, research and knowledge transfer, 

focused in specific and distinctive areas of core strength.‟ 

„Provide a first-rate experience of university for both students and staff.‟ 

„Establish a robust organisational infrastructure.‟ 

The 2006 strategic plan puts considerable importance on the student experience; the 18-21 year 

student customer is the top priority. 

BCE is most clearly prioritised in the objective to have: 

„An enterprise culture embedded across the University.‟ 

The objective is to be achieved by actions such as: 

„Review the relevant procedures and structures, to enable the University to be innovative and 

entrepreneurial in seizing new market opportunities in the UK and overseas, while maintaining quality 

and minimising risk.‟ 

„Build our engagement with local, national and international businesses.‟ 

RU‘s strategic plan contains no specific targets for revenue generation or revenue diversification 

linked to BCE. 

Creative Futures supported by ECIF emergency funding is a short-term project triggered by the 

economic recession that is within RU‘s strategic plan to enable innovation and build engagement. 

This report is designed to provide input on BCE and CRM into the current process of examining the 

long term strategic outlook for the period 2012—2025. 

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Assessment of Institutional Needs for Customer Relationship Management 

This section summarises input from the project Stakeholders on the role and importance of CRM 

today and in the future. These views have been consolidated into: 

(i) A set of initial conditions 

(ii) Gaps between initial conditions and strategic BCE objectives, 

(iii) Requirements for CRM enabled BCE. 

The summary follows the structure of the Stakeholder interviews. The set of interview questions used 

to conduct the stakeholder interviews is given at Appendix C. 

Customers 

Stakeholders are divided about embracing the word ‗customer‘. At TVU, stakeholders in or close to 

the senior management team say the recognition of the customer is critical to TVU‘s new mission. 

For teaching staff, it is a word strongly associated with commercial money making activities and 

implies subservience to customers‘ needs rather than giving guidance. Stakeholders and members of 

staff from a commercial background have no problem with the word customer. Many are frustrated 

they cannot act towards customers as they would in a commercial setting. 

On the other hand, using the term ‗customer‘ to cover the main body of 18-21 year old students is not 

accepted by many, because these customers are not viewed as really paying customers or 

necessarily knowing what they want or what is best for them. ‗Student‘ is not seen as satisfactory as it 

is associated with young adults who exhibit both immature behaviour and expectations. Overall, 

‗learner‘ was preferred to student. 

It is not possible to separate employer sponsored, or employed students from other students for 

education and training services. There is a general recognition among stakeholders that the 

customary levels of service will have to rise considerably to meet the much higher expectations of 

these new customers. 

Important Customers 

Outside of the organisational units and teams responsible for BCE there is little consideration of who 

are the most important customers. 

18-21 year old student customers dominate current thinking, and HEFCE is mentioned more often 

than employers. The very term full time equivalent (FTE) effectively converts new employer 

sponsored customers into the common currency of higher education, even though in reality at TVU 

two thirds of students study part-time and 60% are over 25 years old. 

A common theme was the importance of having impact on the local community. To this end 

stakeholders could identify key accounts such as Local Authorities. A satisfied and loyal local council 

is a powerful reference and a channel to further BCE opportunities for universities. 

Formal customer segmentation and targeting is emerging and is a high priority requirement for CRM 

support. 

Stakeholder‘s Customer Segments 

Organisations 

Government/HEFCE 

Other Funding Bodies 

Networks: Formal and Informal 

Businesses 

>500, >50, >10 employees 

SMEs (Medium 50-249, Small 10-49, Micro 1-9 employees) 

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Eligible for Financial Subsidy 

Individuals 

UK Learners 

EU Learners 

Non-EU Learners 

Employed (Part-time Full-time) 

Currently Learning with the university (Part-time Full-time) 

Alumni 

Not-learning with the university (prospective) 

Eligible for Financial Subsidy 

Internal Customers 

Within BCE units and teams there is good clarity on the need to rank and focus on customers 

according to their financial potential - ‗big companies who can buy training in bulk‘, and for knowledge 

transfer services to focus on micro businesses that see most value in working with a university. 

Knowledge transfer and consultancy engagements are evidenced by the development of close 

relationships and a deep understanding of the mutual benefits of engagement. 

Small and micro companies benefit from the credibility of working with a university. They gain access 

to higher quality resources and facilities often at low or highly subsidised prices. Similarly, enhancing 

the university‘s reputation and academic standing is a high priority. Customers are assessed and 

ranked in accordance with holistic and qualitative criteria, their fit with the research, teaching and 

enterprise strategy of the institution. In summary, both parties see engagement as an opportunity to 

enhance the reputational aspects of their brand. 

Alumni customers are underdeveloped for BCE potential. Alumni are treated as a separate set of 

contacts. Oddly, the conventional data management method to keep relationships with past 

customers is to remove them from the main customer database – the student records system, 

because they are no longer students. This single relationship, transitory relationship – learning, clearly 

has to be replaced with a wider definition that spans the customer‘s life-time. 

The Customer Life time Perspective 

For RU supporting the customer lifecycle is a key requirement. RU has recently begun using CRM to 

engage alumni, yielding a six figure sum in donations. Customers expect their university to maintain a 

corporate memory of their history and anticipate their needs – for example as they progress from 

student to alumni, to senior manager, to part-time student, to employer, to supplier etc. The customer 

life cycle perspective also helps the staff understand ‗what it is really like to be a life-time customer of 

the institution‘. It was noted that there are social networking solutions that offer more facilities than the 

conventional CRM solutions available today. 

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Single Customer Database 

For RU another key requirement was to have a single repository or customer database capable of 

supporting all customer interactions. This is captured in the following diagram derived from the BCE 

CRM Self Analysis Framework. 

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Organisation and Individual 

In both RU and TVU there was an appreciation that BCE requires HEIs to have a handle on the 

complex relationship between individuals and organisations. This includes where persons work now 

and worked in the past, where they have studied. Are they being sponsored by their employer? What 

is their role in an organisation? How are they connected to other persons and organisations? 

This information was not supported by current systems. Indeed current systems are unable to capture 

new learners generated by employer engagement. Organisations and learners remain segregated. 

Responsibility for Customers 

The most common response was ‗everyone was responsible for customers‘. There is a strong 

personal service culture in universities. The core student customers develop close relationships with 

staff members with whom they come in regular contact. Paradoxically, this means no one is actually 

responsible for the customer experience. There are no customer champions making the voice of the 

customer heard in the same sense of account or relationship managers. This is understandable when 

the prevailing core business is serving large numbers of students who cease being customers after a 

few years. 

It was recognised that the current customer culture has to change: 

1. To meet the needs and expectations of employers and their sponsored learners. 

2. To support jointly developed education and training programmes. 

3. To retain customers beyond the three year lifespan of the traditional ‗close encounter‘ with higher 

education. 

4. To meet rising societal expectations of customer service, choice and value for money, otherwise 

known as customer sovereignty. 

In the multiple customer interface service environment in an HEI, CRM can play an important role by 

making customer information available at all these touch points. When dealing with a bank, a hotel, 

the local council, etc we have come to expect that the person serving us has the relevant information 

about us at the point of service. 

BCE teams embraced managing the ‗customer journey‘ and the ‗customer experience‘. These 

principals of customer relationship management are also important to student administration, student 

accommodation, and most other customer touch points. They are also important to marketing and to 

the senior management team. 

The Future Skills BCE team has a specific role - Enterprise Skills Advisors, to facilitate the customer 

journey. They work alongside Business Development Managers who are Future Skills account 

managers, responsible for engaging employers and facilitating the provision of education and services 

from the Faculties. 

Explicit Objectives, Institutional Statements about Customers 

As described in this report, TVU‘s strategic plan is very clear about the vital importance of BCE in 

achieving the institution‘s vision of becoming the UK‘s leading university for employer engagement. 

It is interesting to note the actual word ‗customer‘ is not used; nevertheless it is very clear to whom 

TVU is orientating itself. 

It was observed that stakeholders‘ knowledge about the formal aspects of the university‘s strategic 

direction varies widely. The senior management team and their immediate reports know the contents 

of strategic plan in detail. Outside that immediate circle knowledge about formal statements related to 

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customers is much more limited. Even members of the BCE team had only limited awareness of the 

strategic plan. 

Despite the strategic plan being a rich source of aims and objectives supported by key performance 

measures, not enough had trickled down to persons delivering the plan. It is essential that strategic 

BCE plans are converted into operational plans that are known, understood and actioned. Operational 

plans drive the change process needed to implement CRM. 

At RU, the lack of an up-to-date strategic plan with customer objectives is reflected in stakeholders‘ 

unanimous view that they know of no formal institutional statements concerning customers. 

Informal Objectives, Actual Behaviour towards Customers 

Everyone realises that without student customers there is no university. At RU one stakeholder 

commented that the ‗best generators of future sales are satisfied students.‘ Non academic staff found 

it easier to make the link from student numbers to their employment security, academic staff much 

less so. 

While the economics of employer-led education are sound teaching departments and faculties need 

assistance to work through the numbers. There are higher set-up costs, and HEFCE funding can be 

50% less than normal student funding. Employers, especially the smaller ones, ask for training and 

education for only small numbers of students. If the teaching faculties and departments set the breakeven 

enrolment number too high, BCE units cannot meet customer‘s needs. ‗There is a preference to 

tweak existing products rather than develop new ones specifically for employers.‘ 

In contrast, for knowledge transfer consultancy services there is a much better connection between 

BCE strategy and teaching and research. 


There are no explicit objectives, or other institutional statements directly related to customer 

relationships. It was thought that the visionary statements, such as ‗understanding the world of work‘ 

had to be translated into practical operational strategies and actions, such as Codes of Conduct or 

Service Level Agreements (SLAs), or there was a danger that these high level statements would 

become viewed as mere platitudes. 

Stakeholders closely associated with the BCE team fully understood the role of relationships in finding 

and keeping customers. Terms used to describe relationships include, bi-directional, building rapport 

and trust, learning customer attitudes, patterns of behaviour and understanding their wants and 

needs. The need to take a long term approach, and meet expectations by following through on what 

was promised, at the right time, and the right quality etc. The strength of relationship was measurable 

by customer retention and loyalty, especially repeat business. 

Some stakeholders felt relationships were not being developed and managed, ‗they are just 

happening‘. One stakeholder thought both customers and relationships had to be segmented because 

‗the depth of relationship will vary, shallow (transactional) with many, deep relationships with a few.‘ 

It was also made clear that to deliver on relationships; the whole institution had to adopt the same 

approach. Many stakeholders gave equal importance to meeting internal customer‘s needs, a 

reference to getting internal relationships and processes right as a necessary precondition to being 

able to satisfy external customer needs. An important finding is that there are no processes for 

managing internal customers. 

CRM 

The term CRM is very strongly associated with an IT system or a database, rather than a process, 

strategy or philosophy for achieving institutional organisational objectives. For most stakeholders, 

CRM is having a system to know who your customers are, to sort and filter them, to keep in touch with 

them and for marketing. However, an RU stakeholder thought CRM was a confusing term, as 

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Final Report 

everyone defined it in their own terms. The peripheral nature of CRM at RU is illustrated by calling it 

the ‗contact management system‘. 

Customer Value 

Stakeholders from the teaching and research faculties were not familiar with the term ‗customer 

value‘. Education is regarded as a ‗good in its own right‘ and requires no further justification. 

Members of the senior management team recognised that as HEIs compete on the same price point, 

differential value comes from every other element of the customer offer and experience. Customer 

value is the sum of the benefits for the customer. ‗Did it solve the problem, and did it meet customers‘ 

expectations?‘ 

It was recognised that the benefits of education and training for employers and employees are 

different and may conflict. 

A very significant finding was the focus on the National Student Satisfaction survey and other external 

league tables. It is widely believed that the survey is showing on a national scale who is delivering 

value and who is not. It is very clear that while many academic staff are antipathetic towards terms 

like ‗customer‘, ‗business‘, ‗value‘ etc they do respond very strongly to customer feedback as a matter 

of professional pride. This is an important key to unlocking the potential of CRM in HEIs. 

One stakeholder observed ‗customer value can be measured simply by asking‘. The CRM strategy 

must be to help internalise the measure customer value and satisfaction as part of the university‘s 

own processes. 

Institutional Value 

There was a consensus on what the institutions wanted in return for creating value for customers – 

money, but also recognition for a job well done. Reputation and brand enhancement were universally 

important. 

Creating Customer Value - Current Performance 

TVU CRM plan stakeholders thought customers‘ expectations were being met and often exceeded 

across the university, all the time, in particular in the areas of hospitality, professional studies, and 

retail operations. Examples of very successful recent collaborations with employers include News 

International, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), and a start-up IT Company. 

On the other hand, stakeholders observed customer value was being destroyed. Basic internal 

processes are not strong enough. Business and community organisations have an expectation that 

they are dealing with a large dependable low risk organisation, when in reality this is not always the 

case. HEIs are not agile; reviews, sign-offs and approvals ‗take forever‘. 'HEIs are reticent about 

taking decisions; they sit on things which upset customers.' Courses and classes have been cancelled 

at short notice. Facilities are not open when needed, reflecting a 9-5 culture. Timetabling does not 

cater for part-time and mature students with family commitments. Some teaching is not good enough 

to meet the expectations of employer sponsored learners. A stakeholder felt the university should put 

its best lecturers on courses for students sponsored by local employers. Once a reputation for quality 

had been established the employers and students would spread the word locally. 

One stakeholder reflecting on the lack of a single system commented, ‗Who can say whether a key 

partner is happy or not, or is receiving multiple incompatible requests from different departments?‘ 

There is no one place to obtain an answer on a given question relating to the customer; the school 

may have one perspective, administration another, and the CRM system another. This makes it very 

difficult for the university to manage customer relationships effectively.‘ 

Stakeholders with experience of other HEIs proposed to concentrate or invest resources in one or two 

areas that already had critical mass and good leadership, whose success would breed more success 

as the extra income is reinvested in additional staff, facilities, etc. 

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5.2 Value Added Activities for Employer-Customers and Student-Customers 

In this section, the report lists the ways which stakeholders thought would be best to develop 

customer value for employers and employed students, sponsored by customers. 

Sources of Customer Value: 

Learners 

Hard (Quantitative Measures) Medium (Mix of Quantitative Soft (Qualitative 

and Qualitative Measures) Measures) 

1. Employability 1. Access to Higher Education 1.Empowerment 

2. Career Progression 2. Better Life 2. Self Esteem 

3. Professional Skills 3. University activities 3. Pride in University 

4. Stronger CV 4. Campus facilities 4. University experience 

5. London job market 5. Location 5. Independent living 

6. Work visa 6. Transport ease of access 

7. Challenge to own ideas 

Employers 

Hard (Quantitative Measures) Medium (Mix of Quantitative 

and Qualitative Measures) 

1. Help retain customers 1. Reputation and credibility 

2. Win new business 2. Networking 

3. Save money 3. Benchmark own knowledge 

4. Tailored programmes 4. Access to University experts 

5. Employee productivity 5. Innovation 

6. Employee retention 6. Location 

7. Government grants 7. Transport ease of access 

8. Pay-back period 8. Challenge to own ideas 

Non-Value Added Activities and Barriers to Customer Value Creation 

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Soft (Qualitative 

Measures) 

Stakeholders also listed the barriers and non-value added activities they thought must be reduced or 

eradicated. 

Flexibility – the institution needs to be able to react more quickly to customer needs, regardless of 

organisational boundaries. This was particularly acute for the development, sale and delivery of 

employer-led education and training both at TVU and RU. A major barrier was the simple lack of 

product (courses) available in bite sized pieces and driven by customer needs. TVU‘s Future Skills 

began with a Foundation degree in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship targeting unemployed persons 

referred through Job Centre and other partners. Similarly, RU‘s Creative Futures began with a list of 

short one day non-accredited courses. Both these type of education were kept separate from the core 

programmes for 18-21 year old undergraduates. 

The future requirement was for an end-to-end business process to deliver employer led education and 

training products. The process would begin with an analysis of a customer‘s needs, followed if 

necessary by new product design or customisation of a current product, its resourcing and scheduling 

by either internal or by external third party organisations. 

Stakeholders commented that private sector training organisations are much better at packaging and 

delivering education services to a high standard that met employer customer expectations for ‗gloss, 

and slickness‘. 

Such a cross organisational process would address some of the difficulties of working with teaching 

faculties and departments, the 9 to 5 culture and inflexible timetabling. The process would include a



Final Report 

new contracting process that would overcome the problem of ensuring delivery meet agreed customer 

expectations. Courses could not be cancelled at short notice. If internal departments could not meet 

the requirements, the work would be outsourced. Internal departments would not enjoy a monopoly, 

because monopoly always leads to poor customer service. 

Feedback and evaluation across the whole customer engagement process would be made explicit to 

ensure the customer agreement was met. Moreover, the institution would know of any shortfalls in 

service and the future requirements of the customer for repeat business across the whole customer 

experience. This part of the process would address the barrier of having no systematic way to 

complain and no standard procedure for capturing and responding to customer complaints or 

compliments. 

The desired process would not segregate customers either by type or life-cycle stage such as 

becoming an alumnus. All customers would be available through their relationship with the institution 

for engagement activities. 

Activities associated with nurturing, fostering and developing relationships were to be made an explicit 

separate process as opposed to implicit, casual or simply missing in the current ‗as is‘ situation. 

The existence of a complete process would allow any negative experience, even in a simple process 

step that causes customer dissatisfaction to be quickly detected and fixed. 

The new ‗to be‘ process description also had to address the problem of decision making and handoffs 

across the ‗white spaces‘ between organisational units. In a truly customer orientated and led HEI 

there is no time or budget for official meetings, committees and the like. The decision making process 

also has to be automated. The process for costing and pricing has to be quick and simple based on 

cost and price parameters pre-programmed or pre-calculated. Negotiation of terms and conditions 

must be done quickly within pre-set parameters. Of course, the institution has to be much more 

flexible and the process requires similar parameter driven processes for contracting with third party 

outsourced suppliers. 

Finally, to achieve a greater level of maturity in the use of CRM, the new process has to be embedded 

within the complete set of activities and information needs required for BCE. 

5.3 ‘As is’ and ‘To be’ Business Processes 

As has been mentioned earlier in this report, the CRM Self Analysis Framework is too focussed on 

low level processes. The Framework does not make a link between HEI strategy for BCE and the 

processes it needs to execute the strategy. The Framework lacks an ‗architecture‘ to describe and 

communicate to people at all levels the overall scope of BCE, the detailed business processes within 

it, and the cultural, people and process challenges facing an HEI implementing BCE. 

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Furthermore, while the Framework recognises information needs, it doesn‘t provide any structured 

data analysis that can be used to specify the data structures of a CRM solution. CRM solutions are 

much more data orientated than they are process orientated. 

The CRM Self Analysis Framework was extended to include high level function analysis and high 

level data subject analysis to improve both the content, engagement by stakeholders and 

communicability of the models to other HEIs. These techniques were first developed in the 1980s by 

IBM and refined in structured planning methodologies such as Information Strategy Planning. The 

combination of high level functions and data subjects is referred to as the Information Architecture. 

Specific comments made by stakeholders which referred to BCE activities or information needs noted 

during the interviews were sorted together in logical high level activities, called functions, that make 

up the current business activities of institutions that collaborated on this project. Functions are 

activities the institution needs to carry out to accomplish its strategic objectives. These major 

functions help structure and communicate the results, giving some insight into where new solutions 

would be needed to fill gaps between current and future functional requirements. The major functions 

identified are: 









9. Franchise Partner Management - Education 




The high level logical business functions required to implement BCE for employer-led education and 

training are depicted at Appendix E. A small section of the logical function hierarchy is given here 

below. 

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Final Report 

These high level functions are dependent upon one another for information. They also follow a logical 

sequence left to right, top to bottom. Some of the main connections between the high level functions 

required for BCE are given below in a Function Dependency Diagram. It can be thought of as a high 

level or strategic process map for business community engagement. 

1. Organistional 

Management 

Demand for Teaching 

Staff and Faculty 

7. Outsourced Supplier 

Management 

2. Business 

Development 

Competitive Position 

Customer Satisfaction 

5.4 Functional Descriptions 

Organisation Strategy 


Value Proposition 

Relationship Initiative 

5. Customer 

Relationship 

Management 

12. Financial 

Management 

Segmentation Criteria 

Key Stakeholders/ 

Key Accounts 

3. Customer 

Engagement 

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Customer 

Contract/ Order 

Customer Profile 

New/ Modify and Needs 

Product Requirements 

Customer Feedback 

Product Specification 

Funding Requests 

Customer 

Contract 

Customer Feedback 

6. Product and Service 

Management 

Franchise Contract 

4. Customer Service 

Delivery 

Service Delivery 

Schedule 

10. Funding Partner 

Management 

Funding Project Report 

Product Need and 

Collaborative Contract 

Outsourced Supplier‘s Orders 

9. Franchise Partner 

Management 

These high level activities manage the organisation. Activities include: setting the overall strategic 

direction, deciding the internal organisational structure of objectives, roles, responsibilities, and 

policies and procedures. The project identified a missing function i.e., an activity that was spoken of 

as being required to achieve the objectives of BCE but wasn‘t covered in the existing ‗as is‘ situation. 

The function is Internal Customer Management. 


This function contains activities that take organisational strategy and turn it into detailed actions and 

decisions covering what markets to compete in, what offers (customer value propositions) to have, 

how best to compete and also forecast likely demand and calls upon operational capacity. This 

function provides most of the structure of CRM activities and will be reflected in the set up of a CRM 

system e.g. segmentation rules and parameters. 


11. Community Partner 

Management 

Community Needs/ 

Contract 

Customer engagement in a BCE strategy must harmonise marketing and sales organisational units in 

a complimentary set of business functions and processes. In order to support the formulation of the 

CRM strategy and plan, this function has been analysed comprehensively into low level process maps 

covering all activities from initial customer profiling to customer order processing. Functions and 

8. Collaborative Partner 

Management



Final Report 

processes map the customer engagement activities that generate inbound enquiries and other 

conversations with customers. It covers engagement activities to develop tailored offers, negotiation 

of specific terms and conditions and signing of customer agreements. 


This function is included to reflect a major stage in BCE - the delivery of one service, employer led 

education and training services. It is within the scope of both the Future Skills and Creative Futures 

projects. Customer engagement is responsible for negotiating the service to be delivered. This 

function includes staffing, teaching facilities, room booking etc as required to deliver the course of 

study. 

5. Customer Relationship Management (Customer Keeping) 

Although customer keeping is at the heart of CRM, this is another missing function. It implements a 

major recommendation of this report to proactively seek, capture and act upon feedback from 

customers at all touch points. This report recommends this as the best strategy for winning round 

academic and other staff either on the fringe, lukewarm or opposed to BCE. This activity includes 

periodic review of the customer relationship generating new actions for the Customer Engagement 

function. 


For genuine employer-led education and training, this cross organisational function has to be 

integrated with the Customer Engagement function. This activity can be triggered by a customer 

engagement that requires the development, resourcing, costing, pricing and scheduling of a new 

education product. 

This function includes all activities from initial idea to specification, development, testing, costing, and 

pricing through quality assurance and accreditation, to being available for delivery. This function 

develops the module structure, the learning outcomes and other aspects of product specification to 

make it ready to include in customer agreements and also for delivery as an education service. It 

includes pricing where all costs are recovered, and contribution margins are set according to market 

conditions. 


The BCE strategy embodied by the two institutions requires the use of external suppliers to fulfil 

customer requirements e.g. the hiring of classrooms from a third party organisation, staff or 

outsourcing the entire customer service delivery. 


The management of employers and other collaborations is a major function of BCE. This activity 

encompasses the development of relationships and contracts to build and deliver courses with other 

organisations including employers like the Pearson Group, Vodafone and Hewlett Packard. 

9. Franchise Partner Management – Education 

This high level function manages third party channel partners, delivering an institution‘s products 

under their own name. For example, it covers collaborative agreements with foreign institutions and 

local FECs. 


Providing funding support to employers and other customers is a significant source of customer and 

institutional value. The availability of funding drives business development strategy and customer 

engagement. Funding Partners also require customer relationship management of both the funder 

and the funded. This function also covers internal and external reporting to HEFCE and HESA (Higher 

Education Statistics Agency) using customer activity information held in the CRM system. 

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Final Report 


This activity reflects the large and diverse BCE ecosystem of networks such as Chambers of 

Commerce, Non Government Organisations (NGOs), Job Centres and other referral and influencing 

organisations who must be actively managed to achieve the CRM strategy. 


Financial management is within the scope of an end-to-end customer process. Invoices and payments 

are generated as a result of customer agreements, orders and the completion of customer services. 

They mark milestones in customer process and sum to the total financial value of a customer 

engagement. 

5.5 Strategic Information Needs – Data Subject Areas 

The strategic information needs for BCE were also specified. By analysing the results of the 

Stakeholder interviews, a list of information requirements was made. The information needs were 

collected together under data subject areas – natural subdivisions centred on major resources, 

products, or activities. If the CRM solution were a library, the data subject areas would be the main 

categories under which information would be classified and catalogued. 

The following subject areas were identified: 

9. Customers 

10. Profiles 

11. Relationships 

12. Activities 

13. Agreements 

14. Products 

15. Service Delivery 

16. Payments 

The data subject areas required to implement BCE for employer-led education and training are shown 

immediately below. The lines between the subject areas indicate linkages between the subject areas. 

The linkages called relationships show how data is interconnected. 

A subject area diagram is given immediately below. 

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Final Report 

Data Subject Area 

Diagram BCE 

Relationships 

made by 

Payments 

Customers 

engaged through 

experienced by 

made for 

Activities 

Customers Profiles 


described in matched with 

make 

covered by 

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Agreements 

specify 

Products 

This subject area contains contact information about all individuals of interest to the institution for 

BCE. People are customers. Relationships between people and organisations such employment will 

also be held in this subject area. This subject area includes: contact information about all 

organisations, businesses, competitors, collaborators and community partners of interest to the 

institution for BCE. The area includes information about relationships between organisations such as 

membership of a network, and also between units within a single organisation, such as subsidiaries. 

Profiles 

The area covers detailed profile information including specific needs. Copies or references to key 

documentation will be kept within this subject area. 

Relationships 

This subject area keeps information provided by people or organisations about their customer 

experience including surveys, complaints and compliments. 

Activities 

This area covers all information about plans and activities carried out with customers, including all 

forms of communication. 

Agreements 

The subject area includes promises ranging from informal and non binding agreements to legal 

contracts. Information about adherence to agreements is held in customer relationships. 

Products 

This area keeps information that describes all customer solutions and offers, including costs, prices 

and availability.



Final Report 


The subject area spans the activities, facilities and staff used to deliver products. 

Payments 

Covers information related to invoicing and collection of payments from customers for delivered 

services. 

5.6 Determine Institutional Readiness for Change 

BCE requires considerable change for most HEIs. It does not follow that implementing CRM will make 

change easier. In fact the evidence of this study is that implementing BCE and CRM simultaneously 

can increase the discomfort and difficulty of organisational change. 

Considerable effort was expended extending the CRM Self Analysis Framework to include techniques 

and deliverables to address the ‗soft‘ aspects of implementing CRM, to provide a balance to the ‗hard‘ 

business process and systems aspects of the overall plan. Recommendations for how to manage the 

change process are embodied in the CRM plan. 

The CRM Self Analysis Framework was extended to determine institutional readiness for change by 

performing the following activities. 

1. Understand the current organisational culture using a cultural web. 

2. Examine the current balance of forces for and against change using force field analysis. 

3. Explore the people aspect of change using an ADKAR model of analysis. 

4. Assess organisational capacity for change using Mckinsey‘s 7 Ss. 

5. Check the extent to which change is being managed successfully using Kotter‘s 8 step model of 

change. 

Institutional Culture 

Culture could be simply explained by any member of an organisation as “the way we do things around 

here.” 

‗Culture is learned behaviour …whose components are shared and transmitted by members of a 

group‘ Linton (1945) 

Cultural Web 

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The cultural web (Johnson 1992) is a representation of the taken-for-granted assumptions (the 

paradigm) of an organisation and its physical and behavioural manifestations. The diagram gives an 

overview of the beliefs, values and behaviour of members of an organisation. There are six elements 

that make up the cultural paradigm an organisation. 

(1) Paradigm - This is the overarching set of assumptions that drive behaviour in response to a 

particular issue. Even where the issue is so novel it is outside the collective experience, the core 

paradigm prevails. For HEIs it is to educate and research, funded mainly from the public purse. BCE 

asks HEIs to both educate and knowledge transfer to new groups of customers, including commercial 

organisations on commercial terms, reducing its dependence on public funds. 

(2) Routines - Standardised, regular actions and procedures that are followed regularly, that together 

choreograph the organisation. HEIs work to the regular beat of the academic year, the academic 

promotion cycle, pay round, course accreditation, the annual UCAS (University Central Admissions 

Service) student recruitment cycle, etc. To work in step so as to serve businesses and their 

employees conflicts with these routines. 

(3) Rituals - Activities or events in the traditions of a community that reinforce what is important in the 

culture. The graduation ceremony and debut professorial speeches are examples of important events. 

(4) Stories - Told by members of the group to embed or communicate culture. 

(5) Symbols - Objects, or people that convey, maintain or create meaning over and above their 

functional purpose. The Vice Chancellor‘s ceremonial robes and RU‘s coat of arms are powerful 

symbols. 

(6) Power Structures – Groupings associated with the core beliefs of the culture. 

(7) Organisational Structure – A way power is distributed to show important roles, such as the Senate. 

(8) Control Systems – measurements and reward systems which emphasise what is important to the 

organisation. Do HEI‘s reward, team work, quality, customer service? 

TVU‘s Culture 

TVU‘s culture is one of an emerging new identity disassociated with the past. A new, highly visible, 

modernising management team building a new employer orientated culture to create a financially 

viable institution. In the past, TVU over expanded and gained a reputation for poor quality in some 

areas. A new rewards system, including the promotion of academic staff engaged in enterprise and 

work based learning, has been introduced. New structures, including Future Skills, have been created 

and new members of staff, many from a commercial background, have been hired. TVU‘s Faculties 

responsible for teaching are resistant to change. The academic staff are wary of change and worry 

about keeping their jobs. Some good members of staff have left after taking voluntary redundancy. 

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Final Report 

Impact of TVU‘s Culture on CRM for BCE 

The acceptance of CRM for BCE is bound-up with attitudes towards the Future Skills project. Those 

individuals and groups that support Future Skills will use it and help implement it in their faculties. 

However, until the business processes of the faculties and central departments that control student 

information are aligned and integrated with the strategic plan, CRM will be used selectively only by 

Future Skills for BCE, in the same way the Marketing Department uses CRM for student recruitment. 

RU‘s Culture 

RU‘s culture is also one of emerging new identity as a new university but with a long history 

associated with its previously separate constituent Colleges. The management team are occupied 

with building a functioning university not constrained by the legacy of the College history, e.g. the 

university does not own all of its buildings and land. RU is centred on education of primary school 

teachers, liberal arts, dance, and health sciences with a predominantly female student population. The 

current culture is relatively inward looking and non-commercial, with an undiversified revenue base. 

There is a new focus on academic leadership to build the research reputation of the university. There 

are limited employer facing activities driven by external HEFCE funding for business and community 

interaction. 

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Final Report 

Impact of RU‘s Culture on CRM for BCE 

There is no strategic imperative for the widespread adoption of CRM at RU. The university could 

improve its BCE performance but it simply is not a priority at the moment. The culture is unsuitable for 

BCE. Control and reward systems are heavily biased toward teaching and especially research. CRM 

is likely to be embraced for the commercialisation of research, and research orientated knowledge 

transfer. 

Forces For and Against Change 

Force field analysis was used to help understand the change process in TVU and RU. Developed by 

Lewin (1951), change is characterised as a state of imbalance between forces driving change and 

restraining forces. Achieving change is a three step process. 

1. Unfreezing the current balance of driving and restraining forces that hold an organisation in a state 

of quasi-equilibrium. 

2. Enabling change by increasing the drivers, reducing the restraints or a combination of both. 

3. Once the desired change is complete, forces are brought back into relative balance and re-frozen. 

This approach was used to identify the key stakeholders in the CRM strategy. 

TVU‘s Balance of Forces 

The organisation is certainly unfrozen and change is taking place at TVU. The driving forces are 

stronger than the restraining forces, resulting in success and an improved reputation. More wins are 

likely soon. 

According to one Stakeholder, the delay in building up the strength, know how, and know who 

capabilities of the Future Skills team have slowed the process of change. In knowledge transfer, 

Future Skills has made excellent progress compared with the starting position. TVU is adding to the 

strengths of the Future Skills team and simultaneously reducing the opposing forces. New 

demonstration projects, including an ambitious student placement scheme, will enhance BCE. 

RU‘s Balance of Forces 

Whilst the university is undergoing change, the forces for further BCE and the adoption of CRM are 

outweighed by the restraining forces. The Agresso CRM system is not universally liked; resources 

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and expertise for its roll-out are in short supply, so much so that during the course of this project all 

further CRM projects were put on hold. Creative Futures is not using the CRM system. 

Capability and Capacity for Change 

ADKAR 

ADKAR developed by Hiatt (2006) is another change management technique that can help overcome 

organisational resistance to change. Being more simple and easy to understand, it helps managers 

with the day-to-day task of facilitating a change process. 

ADKAR is implemented in sequence i.e. Awareness before Desire etc. 

A: Awareness of the need for change, including external and internal drivers e.g. what is in it for me. 

D: Desire to support and participate in change. Desire is a personal choice. 

K: Knowledge of how to change. Includes everything required - skills, tools, behaviours, techniques, 

processes, etc. 

A: Ability to implement required skills and behaviours to turn knowledge into action. 

R: Reinforcement to sustain change. Internal and external motivators: rewards, events, personal 

satisfaction etc 

ADKAR 

Senior management is very aware of the 

need to change. For them there is much at 

stake. Awareness reduces in proportion to 

distance from management team. 

Desire to support and participate in BCE is 

patchy among teaching staff. High in 

Future Skills team and Fellows, tempered 

by frustration with the slow pace of change. 

Skills, tools, behaviours, techniques, 

processes are in short supply. 

E.g. dependence on outside CRM 

consultants. 

Lack of experience of a change 

programme of this size. 

Strategic plan is reinforcement. HEFCE 

funding accountability is a strong motivator. 

Not enough carrot and stick to overcome 

silo thinking. 

Perception of Change 

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Employer-led initiatives and BCE a lower 

priority, reflected in awareness among 

staff. 

Desire is restricted to a number of 

individuals scattered across the different 

schools and departments. 

Knowledge exists but is concentrated in 

the RDBO and a small number of 

individuals. 

No experience and talent is working on 

other change management initiatives. 

Few formal incentives for employer 

engagement. Conflict with teaching and 

research goals.



Final Report 

It was noted that individuals, teams and organisational units do not perceive the change process in 

the same way. The matrix below plots a difference in perception between the senior management 

team and some of the teaching and research faculties and departments. Senior management are 

embarked on an overhaul of the university, overall the faculties understand the change to be 

synergistic with the established way of teaching. 

Some groups and individuals in the institution will regard the change as limited, while others feel the 

change is unnecessary - ‗overkill. 

McKinsey Consulting 7S Framework 

McKinsey‘s 7-S is a framework for analysing and implementing organisational change based on the 

interrelationship between seven key factors that contribute to organisational effectiveness: structure, 

strategy, systems, style, staff, skills, and shared values or super ordinate goals. The technique is akin 

to the balanced scorecard in that it encourages multi facetted change management. The factors are 

categorized as either "hard" or "soft" elements: 

Hard Elements Soft Elements 

Strategy 

Structure 

Systems 

Shared Values 

Skills 

Style 

Staff 

"Hard" elements are easier to define or identify and management can directly influence them. These 

are strategy statements; organization charts and reporting lines; and formal processes and IT 

systems. 

"Soft" elements, on the other hand, can be more difficult to describe, and are less tangible and more 

influenced by culture. However, these soft elements are as important as the hard elements if the 

organisation is to be successful. Hence, Peters and Waterman Jr. (1982) commented that the 7 S 

Framework reminds a manager that ‗soft is hard‘. 

The project took a snapshot of institutional readiness for implementing CRM to support BCE. The 

results for both TVU and RU are depicted below in a spider diagram. The analysis helped ensure the 

CRM strategy and plan takes into account the state of readiness. 

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Final Report 

Kotter's 8-Step Change Model 

Kotter (1996) says the primary goal of change is to help cope with a new, more challenging market 

environment. The process of change goes through a series of phases and can consume a 

considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces a 

satisfying result. Critical mistakes in any of the phases can impact the momentum, negating hard-won 

gains. 

It is essential for program leaders and members of staff to understand the steps needed to support 

any transformation initiative taking place during all phases of the change process. 

Kotter‘s 8 step change model is illustrated below. 

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Final Report 

1 

2 

3 

4 

5 

6 

7 

8 

• INCREASE URGENCY 

• Provide evidence from outside the organisation that change is necessary 

• Discuss opportunities and strengths as well as threats and weaknesses 

• BUILD THE GUIDING TEAM 

• Provide the team with enough power to make the changes 

• Encourage and reward group work 

• GET THE VISION RIGHT 

• Create a vision directly relevant to the change process 

• Strategies, actions, goals to implement the vision 

• COMMUNICATE FOR BUY-IN 

• Use every vehicle possible, including teaching new behaviours by example 

• Keep it simple use heartfelt stories 

• EMPOWER ACTION 

• Remove obstacles to the change 

• Change systems and / or structures that work against the vision 

• CREATE SHORT TERM WINS 

• Plan for and achieve visible performance improvements 

• Recognise and reward those involved in bringing the improvements to life 

• DO NOT LET UP 

• Recognize and reward personnel involved in the improvements 

• Reinforce the behaviours shown that led to the improvements 

• MAKE CHANGE STICK 

• Communicate the connections between the new behaviours and corporate success 

The project made an assessment of how well the change process for CRM at each university 

compared with Kotter‘s ideal change process. 

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Final Report 

5.7 Process Mapping and Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

Each high level function of the Information Architecture is progressively broken down into lower level 

functions and eventually processes. Processes are the fundamental units of work needed to support 

the objectives and key performance indicators of the business. 

The entire logical function and process hierarchy model is given in spreadsheet form at Appendix F. 

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Final Report 

Processes can be implemented and organised in a variety of different ways, selecting from a variety 

of technologies. Processes support the selection and design of the appropriate system and 

technology. 

As the functions and processes are logical – free of implementation constraints - they help illustrate 

the cultural and organisational barriers to becoming customer orientated. Similarly, the functions and 

processes are logical descriptions of a ‗to be‘ organisational structure, roles and tasks. Being logical 

they are already part engineered. 

Business Process Engineering (BPE) 

Business Process Engineering (BPE) is ―the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business 

processes to bring about dramatic improvements in performance‖. Or put more directly ―when 

exhortation is not enough‖. Hammer (1995) 

The two foundations of any organisation are its people and processes. For an organisation to function 

well, it is essential that employees working in the organisation are motivated, as the business 

processes are efficient and well structured. BPE involves transforming how individuals work as well as 

how processes are designed and operated. Business processes must be engineered to begin and 

end with the customer. 

Hammer (1995) lists the difference between a traditional enterprise and an engineered enterprise as 

follows: 

Aspect Traditional Enterprise Engineered Enterprise 

1. Organised around Function Process 

2. Work unit Department Team 

3. Job description Limited Broad 

4. Measures Narrow End-to-end 

5. Focus Boss Customer 

6. Compensation Activity based Results Based 

7. Manager‘s role Supervisor Coach 

8. Key figure Functional Executive Process owner 

9.Culture Conflict Oriented Collaborative 

BPE has the potential for organisations to achieve radical improvements in performance which can be 

an outcome of improved costs, cycle times, service levels and quality as well as application of new 

technology that is customer-orientated and focuses on providing solutions and value to the customer 

rather than a set of organisational functions. 

Detailed Process Mapping 

The new processes developed and specified by this project are designed to be useful to all HEIs that 

want to offer accredited employer-led education and training products and services. Shorter simpler 

products requiring fewer steps, such as the unaccredited courses offered by private sector 

companies, will be easier to implement. 

The project would like to thank Al Sandra Pennewiss, Alastair Gemmill and Dieter Herde of TVU for 

providing their process descriptions made in preparation for the initial implementation of Agresso 

CRM at TVU. 

Given below is an example of the materials provided: CRM System Flow Diagram - Stage 1 Lead 

Generation to Contract 

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Final Report 

New Lead or 

Contact made 

or found 

Input: 

Contact & 

Organisation 

by Originator 

CRM 

suggests 

Ownership of Lead 

Appointment 

made with 

Client 

Initial Client 

Visit 

Book follow up meeting in diary 

Faculty / 

Client Meeting 

Meeting & 

TNA 

Write up 

Data 

Input 

Check 

CRM for 

ownership 

CRM 

NEW 

Establish if 

New or Existing 

Organisation / 

Contact? 

Existing 

BDB / SEA 

Confirm or Reject 

lead 

Lead 

contacted by 

BDB / SEA 

Faculty 

Confirm 

Ownership 

Allocated 

Needs 

confrimed by 

Telephone 

E-mail, Phone or Meeting 

Rejected 

Level of 

Engagement 

Assessed 

BDB & Faculty 

Discuss and Decide 

to Deliver or 

Outsource 

Training 

Proposal 

Agreed 

Contract 

Signed 

Manually Seek (Phone) 

CRM Auto seeks 

permission from 

Owner 

Lead send to 

CRM Admin to 

manually 

allocate 

Outsource 

CRM 

Outsource 

Trainer 

contacted 

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No Answer 

after 24hours 

Permission 

Granted? 

Permission 

Granted 

Set Reminder task 

to Contact Client 

Client 

Uniterested 

Permission NOT 

Granted 

The first step in developing the process maps was to further decompose (break-down) the high level 

functions required to implement the BCE strategy. Functions consist of business processes. The 

lowest level (leaf) processes are defined as elementary processes. Elementary processes are logical 

units of work that cannot be broken down further. Typically, an elementary process can be performed 

by one person in one place from start to finish without stopping. All the necessary inputs and preconditions 

exist at the time an elementary process starts. 

The decomposition of higher level functions results in groups of elementary processes that are 

naturally related and mutually supportive in the execution of a function. These lower level processes 

form the scope of business process maps. 

The following process maps were developed. 

1. Customer Investigation and Profiling 

2. Customer Engagement - Education 

3. Customer Contacting 

4. Customer Contracting and Order Processing 

5. Customer Service Delivery - Education 


7. Product and Service Management – Education



Final Report 

The process maps are given in Appendix G. Although the process maps here are specifically about 

the delivery of education and training products and services, clearly they contain functions and 

processes that should work as templates for other BCE products and services including knowledge 

transfer. 

Data Entities 

Continuing the method to model both activities and data, as the high level functions are broken down 

into processes, so the high level subject areas are broken down into their constituent parts, data 

objects called entities - a fundamental object or thing about which data could be kept. These logical 

entities can be implemented as tables within the CRM system‘s database, or supported as manual 

files of documents, or links to web pages. 

At the entity level much more is known of the size and complexity of the CRM implementation plan. 

It is easier to see how data must be connected and some of the choices the implementation plan will 

have to make. It is clear that to support BCE; more than just a CRM system is involved. To support 

the connections or relationships between data, systems will have to be connected, a task not easily 

accomplished. 

The data entities are described in outline in the entity relationship diagrams at Appendix H. 

5.7 CRM Strategy and Implementation Plan 

The CRM strategy is to implement TVU‘s BCE strategy. Given below is an extract of TVU‘s BCE 

Strategy Balanced Score Card. 

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Final Report 

To implement the BCE strategy the CRM solution must support the high level functions and lower 

level processes that do the work necessary to reach the objectives of the BCE strategy. Given below 

is an extract of the function and process hierarchy. 

Similarly, for these activities to work, they require data either gathered from outside from customers, 

or created by other processes. These data requirements were documented as data subject areas, 

entities and relationships. Given below is an extract of the entity relationships for person. 

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Final Report 

A CRM system is in essence a complex data store that supports these information processing 

requirements. In this way the functionality and data structures of a CRM system can be linked directly 

to an institution‘s strategic priorities. 

Objectives for the CRM Strategy 

By further decomposition of TVU‘s BCE Strategy Balanced Score Card and additional input from RU‘s 

CRM team, specific objectives for CRM were listed by stakeholders. 

1. Increase employer sponsored student numbers, thereby receiving increased funds from the 

government and funds or in-kind contribution from employers. 

a. Be able to offer standard and customised education products and services to fit 

employer requirements at a profit. 

2. Increase revenue from knowledge transfer and other innovative products and services for 

employers. 

3. Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of customer engagement. 

a. Deepen knowledge of the needs and how to work with employer customers and their 

employee students. 

b. Improve the targeting and engagement with prospective employers and students 

c. Be able to respond quickly to enquiries and potential sales opportunities. 

d. Track the results of customer engagement (marketing and sales) activities to 

enrolment and revenue, and calculate the ROI in customer engagement investments. 

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Final Report 

4. Enhancing employer and employee student retention and loyalty. 

a. Be able to capture and meet customers‘ needs and expectations. 

b. Survey customers‘ experience vs. expectations. 

c. Be able to track customers‘ engagement history. 

5. Improve management monitoring and control of the customer engagement function. 

Strategies, Tactics and CRM Functional Requirements 

1. Have a common view of customer data through cross-functional sharing of information. 

2. Hold customer data once and in one place. 

3. Engage customers in a consistent conversation across organisational boundaries, no matter 

how many applications for study they have made, or how many different faculties are involved 

in the process. 

4. Employers and prospective customers receive personalised, consistent, non duplicated 

communications from the university 

5. Staff members to be able to view relevant customer information to improve customer facing 

processes; e.g. all communications, correspondence and events with students and 

employers. 

6. Calculate return on investment from customer engagement marketing and sales campaigns. 

7. Extend customer processes to capture and record customer expectations, satisfaction and 

loyalty. 

8. Extend customer processes to include the selection of products and services, and their 

customisation in response to employer needs. 

9. Determine the revenue and contribution from BCE initiatives. 

10. Increase efficiency by increasing customer self service. 

CRM Implementation Plan 

The plan is driven by the BCE strategy. 

It is not driven by the current or future functionality of Agresso CRM. As both TVU and RU are existing 

users of Agresso CRM, the plan comments on the degree to which the incumbent solution supports 

requirements. 

The plan is divided into the following components that reflect the findings of this project. 

1. Strategy 

2. Structure 

3. Culture – Shared Values and Style 

4. People – Staff and Skills 

5. Processes, Data and Systems 

6. Internal Change Management 

1. Strategy 

TVU 

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Final Report 

1.1 Enhance and extend the current strategic plan. 

TVU has an excellent strategic plan for BCE. The strategic plan must be complemented by specific 

references to a customer, and customer relationship strategy. Furthermore, the strategic plan should 

be complemented by operational plans to bridge the gap between strategy and implementation. 

RU 

1.1 Develop a new strategic plan. 

RU‘s forthcoming strategic plan for the period 2011 to 2025 must include strategies for income 

diversification, BCE and customers. In the strategic plan RU has the opportunity to unfreeze the 

current culture and adopt a more customer and employer focussed vision of the future. 

2. Structure 

TVU 

2.1 Form a cross Institution CRM Strategy and Plan Steering Committee. 

2.2 Develop an organisational change plan for BCE. 

2.3 Change the existing organisational structure and organisation of roles, tasks and business 

processes to implement the logical functional descriptions for BCE given in this report. Specifically: 

a) Organisation Management. Build a business process development function whose 

objective is to build new internal processes to support external and internal customers. 

b) Business Development. Have a single function to manage the development of both the 

existing core business of teaching 18-21 year olds and new business opportunities. This will 

serve to develop a common view of customer across the institution. 

c) Customer Engagement Replace separate sales and marketing activities with a new 

customer engagement function. Employer engagement has led to the need for business to 

business (B2B) account management and similar engagement strategies to complement the 

business to consumer (B2C) approach to student recruitment. For an employer led 

organisation with many more student customers driven by BCE, then a single function for 

customer engagement is essential. Again this new structure will serve to develop a common 

view of customer across the institution. 

In addition, this function must be integrated seamlessly with Product and Service 

Management if the new customer requirements for products and service are to be met. 

d) Customer Relationship Management This function simply is not being done in a way that 

serves the strategic direction of HEIs that want to put customers first. The existing quality 

assurance student survey activities would be greatly expanded to ‗design-in‘ customer 

feedback and also initiate conversations with customers on how the relationship should be 

developed. This activity could be carried out by third party specialists. Customer satisfaction 

should be directly linked to incentives and rewards. 

e) Product and Service Management – Education. Technically outside the scope of a 

traditional CRM system, nevertheless this function must be re-engineered to meet new 

customer needs for bite sized, flexible learning. The bureaucracy needs to be removed, the 

business and customer acumen increased, and employers let into the function to help specify 

products. This topic was exhaustively covered in the previous JISC sponsored study. 

f) Outsourced Supplier Management - Education Staff and Facilities. Another missing 

function, it is often mentioned as the only way to ensure new customers‘ needs are met, and 

also that an HEI‘s teaching function does not monopolise supply. To implement Creative 

Futures, RU went to outside training providers. There are over 10,000 VAT registered 

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Final Report 

organisations providing professional education and training for businesses and their staff in 

the UK. 

g) Collaborator, Franchise, Funding and Community Partner Management These activities 

must be further developed as part of BCE. 

h) Financial Management. To access new sources of funding, to allow customers to pay 

online, and to collect on employers‘ promises of in-kind contribution will require changes to a 

finance function mainly versed in HEFCE funding and disbursements. 

3. Culture – Shared Values and Style 

3.1 To become more customer focussed will change the culture. Clearly, listening to customers and 

working hard to build customer value and satisfaction will become shared values. To achieve this, the 

issue of incentives, rewards and sanctions must be addressed as a top priority. There simply isn‘t 

enough in BCE, carrot or stick, for change to work on a significant scale. All forms of BCE should be 

rewarded as it builds relationships that later can become revenue earning. 

3.2 HEIs should forget about academics sharing contacts unless they reward the behaviour. The 

Customer Engagement function (BCE unit) should take responsibility and generate contacts for the 

institution, manage the accounts and bring in staff members as required to service them. This how 

any normal business works, moreover, how FECs operate today. 

3.3 Focus resources on already successful business units, ‗reinforce success, and starve the rest.‘ 

4. People – Staff and Skills 

4.1 Hire or train professional sales and account managers, hiring for impact not for cost. 

4.2 Hire or train organisational change managers and other stakeholders. 

4.3 Hire or train managers in Business Process Engineering (BPE), Six Sigma or a similar process 

improvement methodology. 

4.4 Hire or train managers in business systems planning, analysis and design. 

4.5 Hire or train more IT staff, especially database administrators, and internal user trainers. 

5. Processes, Data and Systems 

There is already an incumbent CRM system (Agresso CRM). See Overview of Microsoft Dynamics 

CRM and Agresso CRM at Appendix I for a detailed description of the solution. 

This part of the implementation plan consists of a series of smaller implementation projects to: 

a) Customise or extend the existing CRM system. 

b) Add new system support for new processes or processes currently only partially supported. 

c) Develop additional system support to integrate business processes across the institution. 

The function and process hierarchy, together with the data subject area entity relationship diagrams 

used in conjunction with the CRM system documentation given in this report, guide the detailed 

specification of CRM functionality. The process maps given in this report would be used to develop 

specific workflows of procedures, while the entity relationship diagrams are used to develop the 

database design. As it is not necessary to repeat all this material here this section contains a 

summary of the main sub-projects. 

For HEIs using this report to help them select a CRM system, they would use this information in much 

the same way. The evaluation of alternate solutions would use the information architecture as a check 

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Final Report 

list of system requirements. The activity and data descriptions are used to question vendors and 

interpret vendor documentation on available functionality and how specific requirements could be 

implemented. 


No specific processes, data and systems sub-projects. 


2.1 Develop its own ‗soft‘ information system. The information will be mainly reports, papers, 

spreadsheets, presentations and wikis shared within the organisation. 

2.2. Develop information views of CRM data using SQL Views and Web Parts or equivalent 

technology. 

2.3 Develop an information portal solution using technology Microsoft‘s SharePoint to allow a web 

designed and populated by the business development team members to share information. 

2.4 Define the scope of key CRM database entities including Person and Organisation. 

2.5 Set the segmentation rules and parameters for the CRM system database. 

3. Customer Engagement The function will use a significant proportion of the CRM functionality. 

3.1 Define the structure and the procedures to populate the main customer entities in the CRM 

system related to Person and Organisation - Role, Address, Profile, and Need. 

3.2 Define and build in the CRM Customer Engagement Plans and Activities including 

communications, events, meetings etc. 

3.3 Implement ‗closed loop‘ tracking of employer related students. Within Agresso CRM the best way 

would be to combine lead and enquiry functionality. 

3.4 Implement customer agreements. Contractual agreements with specific terms and conditions are 

not supported by database driven CRM systems like Agresso CRM. It has some functionality to 

support basic service agreements. Agreement data is best supported as legal documents or more 

informal forms of agreement registered and shared via SharePoint or an equivalent technology. 

3.5 Make links to a product catalogue for education and consultancy products to support making 

customer offers and negotiating contracts. Agresso CRM supports a product catalogue. Educational 

products will need their own catalogue. See previous project report for system solution prototyped and 

tested by employers for education products. 


4.1 Outside the scope of a CRM system, this function needs its own business process engineering 

project, examining timetabling, resourcing, use of third parties, teaching modalities, and the 

replacement of manual decision making processes with parameter driven procedures. 

4.2 Customise CRM to add service delivery tracking to the customer journey. 

5. Customer Relationship Management (Customer Keeping) 

Providing feedback on the actual customer experience will be a major catalyst for organisational 

change. 

5.1 Use the CRM system to capture customer feedback and to schedule proactive customer surveys. 

Agresso CRM has its own module called Scripting for making questionnaire driven surveys. There 

are also many on-line and mobile customer survey and quality assurance technologies that could be 

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Final Report 

deployed. Information can be held in a portal or linked to a specific customer record as a summary of 

the overall customer relationship. 


6.1 Again outside the scope of a CRM system, this function needs its own business process 

engineering project. See previous project report for a system solution prototyped and tested by 

employers. 


7.1 This new function would use the CRM and related systems to manager suppliers, their 

agreements and link to a product catalogue. 

8. Collaborator, Franchise, Funding and Community Partner Management. 

8.1 Use the CRM system and related systems to manage all partners and their agreements. 


9.1. Integrate invoicing, payments information to the CRM system. 

Business Systems Architecture 

A Business Systems Architecture describes how the principal systems can be integrated together. 

RU‘s proposed configuration is given below. It is based on a common Microsoft architecture of 

business system applications that use Microsoft‘s SQL database connected using a Microsoft 

SharePoint portal implemented using a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). 

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6. Internal Change Management 

The implementation is supported by a change management component focussed exclusively on 

engaging with internal customers and stakeholders. 

CRM Plan Overview 

Part 6: Outcomes 

In this section the project assesses its impact as measured against its original objectives. 

Project Objective 

Overall to help develop the maturity of the consortium universities‘ use of CRM for BCE from 

peripheral to tactical by achieving: 

TVU 

Plan 

Elements 

Strategy 

Structure 

People Staff 

& Skills 

Processes 

Systems & 

Data 

Internal Change 

Management 

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 Phase 6 

Develop 

Customer 

Strategy 

Form CRM 

Management 

Team 

Develop 

process and 

organisational 

change team 

Communicate 

for Buy-in 

Develop 

Organisational 

Change Plan 

Provide 

training in 

business 

systems 

planning 

Gather and 

Reflect on 

Feedback 

Form 

Business 

Process 

Management 

Team 

Develop IT 

team 

Business 

Development 

System 

Better connectedness between BCE, central resources and functions to enable an enterprisewide 


Increased understanding of the interface points between BCE and the Student (Customer) 

Lifecycle. 

Much better insight into the organisational change process within institutions that have a 

reputation for being difficult to change. 

Development of the staff‘s self-confidence to use CRM and to manage the implementation 

project. 

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Communicate 

for Buy-in 

Develop New 

Organisational 

Structure 

Develop 

customer 

account 

Customer 

Engagement 

System 

Gather and 

Reflect on 

Feedback 

Product and 

Service 

Management 

System 

Customer 

Relationship 

Management 

System



Final Report 

The maturity in the use of CRM at TVU overall certainly has increased from the peripheral to the 

tactical during the course of this project due to the very successful implementation of Agresso CRM to 

support the core business of recruitment. The progress of CRM BCE is dependent on the future 

progress of Future Skills to add employer-led education and training. Very significant progress has 

been made in engaging TVU‘s Faculty of the Arts with the Creative Industries sector. The cross 

functional business process described in this report required to deliver employer-led initiatives is 

emerging rapidly. 

There is an increased understanding of the interface points between BCE and the Student (Customer) 

Lifecycle. Future Skills will need to modify the CRM or the surrounding business process to allow the 

tracking of BCE generated learners. As is common with RU managing the interface to the legacy 

student record system is the most complex part of the CRM implementation plan in this area. 

The Future Skills team as led by Deputy Vice Chancellor TVU Chris Birch now have some of the best 

experience in the managing the organisational change process for BCE in the UK. This report 

provides a set of tools backed by relevant case study analysis to help other HEIs following in their 

footsteps. 

In the short term, Future Skills will consolidate its use of the Agresso CRM system that it had hoped to 

have deployed at the time this project started. Again this report provides clear recommendations on 

how to progress the implementation. 

RU 

The maturity in the use of CRM at RU hasn‘t changed over the course of this project. Until a new 

strategic plan is produced with an imperative income diversification through BCE this report remains 

‗food for thought‘. The direction of travel or consensus at RU is to use CRM to support the core 

business of teaching 18-21 year full-time students. The decision early on in this project not to use 

Agresso CRM to support the Creative Futures due to a lack of resources prevented any practical 

lessons being learned from the provision of short-courses to new customers using Agresso. 

Nevertheless, Creative Futures has been delivered and clearly this is a viable low-road strategy for 

BCE. 

Part 7: Conclusions and Recommendations 

This section is primarily aimed at institutions contemplating deploying CRM solutions for BCE. 

1. No two institutions are the same. Nevertheless, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) can learn a 

considerable amount from their peers and other institutions, including Further Education Colleges 

(FECs) who on the whole far more advanced in the application of CRM to employer-led education and 

training. It is strongly recommended to spend time investigating previous projects and use the skills 

and experience of similar institutions that have completed a CRM implementation project. Indeed this 

report is an attempt to share relevant experience from two institutions starting from the peripheral 

stage of maturity. 

2. The terms customer, relationship and customer value can be new terms in an HEI setting. 

Discussion can generate conflicting views. Nevertheless, it is impossible to build new business 

processes to generate customer value until there is a shared understanding and ‗buy-in‘ to the 

language and strategic importance of customer relationships. 

3. Before beginning a CRM implementation, institutions should determine clearly who their new 

customers are, why they must be your customers, how they are going to be served, and the likely 

impact on the institution. This will enable institutions to focus clearly on the customers that really 

matter, narrow the scope of the project and increase the likelihood of a return on investment. 

4. Having a strategic plan that spells out the BCE mission, objectives, strategies and actions is 

essential. CRM has to be led from the top. It cannot be delegated as an operational task to middle 

management. 

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Final Report 

5. Because BCE is relatively new, institutions setting out on CRM for BCE should not be surprised if 

the business processes required to select customers and develop value creating relationships do not 

yet exist in their institutions. Paradoxical as it may sound HEIs have an embedded culture of not 

having to consider who it wants to be its customers. 

6. Few HEIs have achieved the strategic implementation of CRM for BCE. Institutions are 

recommended to carefully consider their objectives and ambition for CRM. As this report shows there 

are high, middle and low road CRM strategies for BCE. 

7. ‗Low road‘ BCE strategies would include provision of knowledge transfer, or non accredited short 

courses. Low road strategies do not need a sophisticated CRM system and the organisational impact 

can be minimised by using specialist organisational units set up for the purpose. 

8. ‗High road‘ BCE is Leitch Report style employer-led education and training services. This is likely to 

be the most difficult for HEIs, as it requires the integration of BCE with the traditional core business of 

teaching 18-21 year old full time undergraduate students. 

9. Less can be more. Regardless of the long term ambition, CRM projects should start on a narrow 

front with an experienced and skilled team, with adequate resources supported directly by senior 

management. Any compromise is likely to lead to difficulties. 

10. Do not begin a BCE project with the purchase of a CRM system. A system should one of the last 

things to consider. Have a CRM system there is implement causes the organisation to focus on the 

system and retrofitting institutional needs to the application. 

11. The JISC recommended CRM Self Analysis Framework, while having some good content, should 

be extended to help include non-IT and CRM specialists in the planning process: 

1. Strategic business planning. 

2. High level business information modelling. 

3. Management of change. 

4. Business systems architecture 

12. CRM projects must include training and practice in the above techniques to the project team and 

stakeholders before beginning the CRM project. 

13. Actual customers must be included in the project. This worked very well in the initial project but 

was not achieved on this project. Customers are excellent at cutting through to what is important and 

helping develop a consensus on customer strategy within the institution. 

14. Changing the existing culture is one of the most challenging aspects of implementing customer 

orientated processes. The ‗soft stuff‘ really is the ‗hard stuff‘. HEIs have strongly embedded and 

‗critical‘ cultures where individuals career paths are not aligned with BCE. 

15. Do not underestimate or underfund the change process. For example, incentives are very 

important .HEIs must address the question of ‗What is in it for me?‘ TVU has been very innovative in 

this respect creating Enterprise and Work Based Learning Fellows at relatively low cost. 

16. To be successful, institutions need complete knowledge and command of the CRM product and 

underlying technology. IT and CRM skills were in short supply in both institutions. 

17. Developing business processes to capture customer feedback should be a priority to develop 

customer orientation. Regardless of stakeholders views on BCE all react to customer feedback. 

18. HEIs should cease persuading academics to share contacts unless they reward this behaviour. 

No organisation should be dependent upon its employees for customer contacts. The Customer 

Engagement function (BCE unit) should take responsibility and generate contacts for the institution, 

coordinate management of customer accounts and deploy staff members to service them. 

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Final Report 

19. To achieve strategic levels of change, institutions have to invest in people and must be prepared 

to hire or train: 

1. Professional sales and account managers 

2. Organisational change managers 

3. Business process improvement engineers 

4. Business systems planning, analysis and design engineers 

5. IT staff, especially database administrators, and internal user trainers 

20. Employer related customers have unusual characteristics. Combining students, employers and 

employees in the same customer database is very complicated. It is recommended to capture 

information about BCE related customers separately from the student record system. 

21. There is a very significant role for ‗soft‘ information systems to support BCE, such as Microsoft‘s 

SharePoint. Not all information related to BCE lends itself to being held in highly structured ‗hard‘ 

database tables of individual fields. Current CRM applications are very data orientated and do not 

lend themselves to the softer activities of BCE such as customer profiling analysis, and negotiation 

amongst others. 

Bibliography 

2GC. (2003) Performance Management and 3rd Generation Balanced Scorecard. 2GC Active 

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Appendixes 

Appendix A: Overview of CRM Self Analysis Framework 

Appendix B: CRM Best Practice – Literature Review 

Appendix C: Interview Questions 

Appendix D: TVU‘s Balanced Score Card for BCE 

Appendix E: High Level Logical Business Function Hierarchy 

Appendix F: Detailed Function and Process Hierarchy 

Appendix G: Process Maps 1 to 7 

Appendix H: Entity Relationship Diagrams – Customers, Products and Agreements 

Appendix I: Overview of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Agresso CRM Parts 1-3 

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