CAQA Digital

About CAQA Digital

Education providers keep discovering that the difficult half of a digital project has almost nothing to do with what was installed. It has to do with how the institution actually works, who knows that, and when anyone is free to find out.

There is a familiar pattern in education institutions that decide to modernise. A great deal of attention goes into what will be put in, how it will be paid for, and when it will be switched on. Comparatively little goes into the question of what the institution currently does, why it does it that way, and which parts of that should survive. The result is a project that finishes on schedule and yet changes very little about the daily experience of the people doing the work. The thing that was installed works. The work did not get better. Those two statements sit together far more often than anyone plans for.

Part of the reason is that technology is legible in a way that organisational habit is not. A piece of software has a name, a price, a delivery date and a person accountable for it. The way an enrolment actually moves through a provider, by contrast, is distributed across a dozen heads, several spreadsheets nobody owns, a shared inbox, and one long serving staff member who knows which exceptions matter. None of that appears in a project plan. It appears later, usually at the worst possible moment, as a series of small crises that look like technical faults and are not.

Digitising a process without redesigning it produces an electronic version of the queue that already existed.

Years of accumulated workarounds live in people, not in documentation, and they are rarely asked.

Planning assumptions borrowed from other sectors break down against a calendar that never clears.

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