Data Management Solution for Belfast Met

Belfast Met is the largest further and Higher Education College in Northern Ireland and one of the largest in the UK. The College provides further and higher education to help students secure their dream career.

After a recent restructure of the Management Information Systems (MIS) Team at Belfast Metropolitan College, it was apparent that there was a significant gap between what the College required and what was being delivered, and what could be provided with the existing reporting tools.

Key Challenges

Customer Challenges

The key challenges faced by Belfast Met consisted of the following:

• Users were very reliant on the existing MIS team for the delivery of key reports
• Due to the amount of data that their current reporting structure could handle, users had no visibility of low-level data
• Reporting was inconsistent throughout the College with some Schools using different base data than others
• Each reporting area was very much in isolation and wider trends could not be analysed

Solution

Adopting an Agile Approach

Version 1 adopted an Agile Business Intelligence implementation approach, understanding what the existing business problems were and analysing the quality of the current data.

Key Features:

•  Mobilisation: Agreed scope and stakeholders
• Capture As-Is: Understood the current business reporting, with feedback from the customer about the quality of these
• Assess and Design To-Be: Undertook a number of workshops to define and document the vision and undertook gap analysis
• Development: Based on the agreed vision we created an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) program and integrated the key business systems
• Testing: Worked alongside the business to test the data
• Training: Had weekly drop-in sessions so that users could further their knowledge of the QlikView application

Real Differences…

…Delivered.

All users in Belfat Met now have consistent and regular reporting, with the ability to view the data that impacts their role at an operational and strategic level. True self-service reporting is now in place, with the core reports allowing Belfast Met to think about how other data could be incorporated.

• Marked attendance registers by tutors increased by 45%
• Over 2,000 user sessions of Qlikview per month with all areas of the College represented, from Deputy CEO to School administrators
• Users now have the ability to drill down and identify trends about courses and students which was not possible before
• An additional set of projects to bring other key College Systems into QlikView