Case study: How RMIT Online managed the rollout of 20 new courses during lockdown

As the pandemic hit our shores and lockdowns came into effect, people decided to use their time to learn new skills.

RMIT Online was one of the universities that people turned to during the lockdown and added 20 new courses in 2020 to keep up with the demand.

However, to manage this large volume of new courses, RMIT Online needed to better manage its workflows.

Will Calvert, director of technology and enablement at RMIT Online told Digital Nation it wanted to deliver courses to its students with innovation and speed.

“That was the key driver for us in a number of our decisions in terms of the way that we've organised our workforce,” he said.

“The people that we've recruited and the tools that we use have all been driven around the ability to move quickly, to get new courses to market, to build new tech to plug into that experience and monday.com has been absolutely critical to enable us to do that.”

To manage the workflow of rolling out 20 courses, Calvert said RMIT Online leveraged industry partners strongly and it's part of its value proposition.

“We have to work closely with our colleagues across the university and that requires a lot of tracking, which monday.com is fantastic at,” he said.

“There is a massive time saving and it's enabled us to scale, grow and react to them quickly. It has been tremendous at creating that visibility between work on the ground and the organisational objectives.”

Through monday.com, RMIT Online has consolidated multiple planning tools into one platform as Calvert explained all of the university’s departments were tired of having disparate systems.  

“All of our departments, technology, HR, finance, student experience teams or product teams, we're all tired of using the same tools, but in slightly different ways. The data was in different spreadsheets spread out,” he said.

“We've been able to bring that all together into one place and the key to that is then the ability for us to ladder that work up into out those organisational objective key results (OKRs).”

He explained every quarter, they have four objectives for their business, some key results that sit underneath that, and then he passes that on to those respective teams.  

“That creates autonomy for those teams and those cross-team squads to create the initiative. We've consolidated all of that workload tracking and planning and management into one place,” he said.

“We've been able to ladder that up and create a clear linkage between the work that someone's doing at their laptop, right now, up to that organisational objective.”

Previously, his staff had a problem that they could not see the linkage between a piece of work and how it links to the overall objective.

“It has grown from there and so that has saved about 300 hours a month in workloads,” Calvert explained.

Calvert recently was on a call with a colleague discussing a new range of policies at the university and to track the policies they created a monday.com board.

“[The adoption] has exploded everywhere, someone else is building a new solution to help us manage the recruitment of staff, someone else is building a mentor management solution on Monday,” he said.

“I'm very happy with that because as long as they are using monday.com in the right way, it's one less thing that my technology team has to build on one of our other platforms. That has been great to see.”