How BPM Improves the College Student Experience

Process Director has empowered many higher education institutions in delivering automated application development and workflow pointed at supporting students’ varied needs. Of course, some of the advantages that BPM delivers are behind the scenes, for things like university administration, student financial aid and a myriad of internal processes. All of these add up to a mountain of Process Director supported use-cases, and result in it being an important engine for schools wanting to deliver an exceptional student experience.

Today’s college students have grown up in a digital world. Just about everything they want is available through their smartphones, and they now expect to be able to scroll their way through tasks and plans. Innovative colleges and universities understand this and are creating highly digital experiences, powered by BPM, to help students with everything they need from admissions all the way to graduation.

Process Director’s capabilities are aligned with the goals of higher education organizations that want to move past legacy systems and adopt digital solutions that meet the needs of demanding student populations. BPM is not just a way to make better use of data and create efficiencies of scale; in the context of education, it is used to provide a more connected overall experience across the student’s lifecycle.

Effective Workflow for Colleges and Universities

Effective workflow is more than just a series of tactical activities. It has to align with user intent and create behaviors that maximize usage and deliver meaning to users. Some organizations see their processes as a series of unconnected events; they don’t see the connectedness of the user experience, nor the value of deploying solutions in the context of the user’s lifecycle while they’re engaged with the organization.

Process Director, however, has been built to recognize that schools serve the needs of an audience that is busy and operates with many competing demands. Many are still learning how to prioritize life events and meet deadlines. Registering, paying, signing-up — these actions and others must be fairly simple and easily incorporated into the daily lives of students in order for solutions to be adopted.

The three most critical aspects of aligning with the student experience are: ease of use, solution context, and communication. Effective workflow ensures that all these elements are met so that users have not just a more efficient experience, but one they can begin to rely on to consistently meet their needs to make student life easier and more meaningful.

Ease of Use for College Students with BPM Software

Most students are in their late teens and early 20’s; this is a generation accustomed to an inbound style of productivity. Rather than having to wait in lines and submit paperwork, they have used online apps and smart forms to deliver and receive information.

To build engaging tools that meet the needs of students, schools can use Process Director to create sophisticated, low-code digital applications that take into account the necessary data and workflow sources on the back-end, and considers how users on the front-end will actually use the app. By being able to create simple apps that integrate relevant information, including smart forms and processes, students can get information they need and take action on things like class scheduling, financial aid, and other relevant events. The application build teams from Process Director’s agile approach to adapt as needed to increase adoption and productivity.

So while Process Director is easy to use for those who need to build applications intended to engage students and help them with decisions and actions necessary to their experience, that ease of use is also reflected in elegant, simple usability that encourages repeatability and adoption.

Managing Academic Workload

Managing an academic workload of multiple classes, administrative issues like financial aid, and extracurricular activities like intramural sports and campus activities all compete for students’ attention. School IT teams use Process Director to optimize the use of data so that the applications they create help students engage and complete tasks with limited disruption to their schedules.

Process Director helps direct the way that organizations surface and orient data through interactive forms and workspaces. Just as human interaction is complex, Process Director looks at the workflows in applications not as a linear phenomenon, but as a continuously shared collection of usable elements that allow for context-based structural changes, last moment decisions, and individualized attentions depending on each circumstance.

The case management approach inherent in Process Director also helps greatly when delivering applications that integrate historical data on students (transcripts, payments, scholarships). With navigable data that can be filtered for omission or inclusion depending on the situation, applications can adapt as the students’ situations change and evolve. This approach supplies students with applications that provide them with what they need when they need it, all without forcing them to search outside the context of the case to find answers.

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Better Communication

Students are bombarded with emails, texts, direct messages, and a host of other types of communication. But more information can go unnoticed if it doesn’t fit with how they are accustomed to consuming information. Schools need to ensure that students see important messages, but also create ways for students to communicate back with them.

With capabilities that facilitate connecting and communicating across departments, Process Director can help schools collect applications, forms, and data sources into a collective portal that delivers all student’s actionable needs into a single interface. That reduces response time and enhances the kind of communication students need in order to meet deadlines, stay on top of opportunities, and keep their good standing with their school.

The digital transformation of higher education cannot happen on an application-by-application basis. Schools that want to align their goals and processes to student behaviors will apply digital transformation through the use of smart workflow and processes. To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative and contextual education workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution of information, and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.