The Brief
Bay of Plenty Polytechnic (Polytechnic) offers the largest range of New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) approved programmes in Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty. In terms of range, the Polytechnic has over 10,000 students and 178 academic staff, covering 4 schools and 34 subject areas. The Polytechnic’s vision is to be New Zealand’s leading regional tertiary education institution creating beneficial partnerships with industry, community and other tertiary institutions.
The Polytechnic needed to improve the gathering and storage of timetabling contacts (Programme Coordinators and Group Leaders). The objectives were to provide:
- More efficient data gathering
- A clearer central view of the status of the timetabling process
- Improved exception reporting
Existing systems on the market were extremely expensive and the decision was made to develop a custom application for the Polytechnic’s needs.
The Process
Cucumber was engaged by the Polytechnic to work with their in-house Business Analysts to assess the feasibility and solution options. From this analysis, we agreed on a web-based data collection application and management tool (together ‘the Web Data Manager’).
Based on the business requirements, Cucumber developed a series of wireframe prototypes with supporting annotated functional specifications. This enabled the Cucumber Developers and Polytechnic Analysts to understand the solution design required and the time and effort needed to build the solution.
Cucumber developed the Web Data Manager using Microsoft .Net 4 Framework technologies (C#, Windows2008, SQL 2008, IIS7, Microsoft Entity Framework).
The Result
The result was a tool that improved the ability of the Polytechnic to assess Tutors requirements, identify potential issues, and make timely resourcing and timetabling decisions with fewer resources. The Polytechnic also received a custom solution at significant savings compared to existing off-the-shelf solutions.