Blog
January 29, 2025
Discover how Harvard DCE partnered with Attain Partners to improve efficiency and user satisfaction with a Salesforce-powered Faculty Management Solution
Attain Partners and Harvard Division of Continuing Education (DCE) officially launched a full Faculty Management Solution based in Salesforce Experience Cloud to improve their course proposal submission process.
This milestone builds on more than a decade of partnership between Attain Partners and Harvard DCE collaborating on digital transformation projects to improve the student and faculty experience and internal processes.
In order to provide flexibility and cutting-edge program offerings to students, Harvard DCE regularly invites current and new instructors to submit proposals for its catalog of nearly 500 courses per term. Each proposal goes through multiple review processes before a decision is made on whether to offer the course and, if so, what the specific format, audience, and schedule will be for each course or section.
Always innovating, Harvard DCE sought a better solution to improve the efficiency and staff and faculty experience around the course proposal submission, selection, and contracting process. With a strong commitment to leveraging Salesforce, Harvard DCE immediately looked for how the solution could be created in the CRM platform.
“The Harvard DCE Teaching Portfolio application replaced disparate systems of manual processes with an innovative solution using Salesforce and other tools. As a result, faculty and staff saved a significant amount of time while also gaining insight into where the courses reside in the proposal submission process,” said Jennifer Sanchez, Senior Salesforce Consultant at Attain Partners.
End-to-end proposal submissions with Salesforce Experience Cloud
Harvard DCE’s new faculty management solution manages the entire lifecycle of each new course from the initial proposal invitation to the potential instructor through the contracting of faculty and teaching assistants needed for the course.
Using Salesforce Experience Cloud, Attain Partners designed a sophisticated solution to enable a user-friendly proposal submission process by gathering all the essential information needed to evaluate and approve courses. This submission process includes the validation of submitter addresses and personal information, collection of course descriptions and requirements, and specification of schedule preferences. Faculty can now use the system to track their proposals through the process. Once courses are approved and published in the catalog, instructors can gain access to additional resources and hire teaching assistants directly through the portal.
The solution also uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud for all communications to faculty, Conga Grid to manage the salary assignments and hiring process, Conga to generate large volumes of contracts based on dynamic fields and support e-signatures, Salesforce Education Data Architecture (EDA) as the foundation data architecture, and OmniStudio for online forms.
A solution built from user needs and experience
As a dedicated Salesforce partner, Attain Partners is committed leveraging the platform to create scalable, built-to-last solutions. Before designing the Faculty Management Solution for Harvard DCE, Design Thinking experts from Attain Partners held several meetings with the Harvard DCE team to fully reimagine the process of creating new courses—irrespective of technology tools.
Leveraging design thinking principles, Attain Partners Strategy Director Melany Barrett led the Harvard DCE team in a four-phased approach, starting with defining a clear vision of success for users and analyzing the current state to map a holistic journey. This process resulted in a vision statement for the transformation rooted in user experience, measurable goals, and a detailed understanding of opportunities to innovate and optimize the faculty course proposal process.
In the next phase, the course lifecycle and portal experiences were defined to align with the project’s goals and desired outcomes, independent of available technology solutions. This effort included mapping a detailed future-state process that outlined the entire lifecycle, phases, and potential scenarios where Attain Partners could innovate and further improve the experience and process.
“[Attain Partners] created a prototype of the faculty portal interface to illustrate how system features and functionalities could be used to foster the faculty experience outlined in the project goals,” said Barrett.
Attain Partners led Design Thinking workshops to keep the Harvard DCE team within the limits and scope of Salesforce tools and extrapolate user requirements for the system.
Empowering faculty with a scalable new system
Harvard DCE has transitioned many of its manual, disconnected, and outdated processes to thoughtfully designed solutions using Salesforce tools. The existing proposal submission process was based in a custom web solution that relied on a static form, while the review process was managed using Microsoft Excel and involved numerous time-consuming manual processes. With their North Star identified and the user experience documented, Attain Partners began building a sophisticated and automated solution in Salesforce.
The first part of the project focused on the process to notify faculty when they are invited to submit a proposal through Experience Cloud and add their details to Salesforce for evaluation. Next, Attain Partners tackled the evaluation and acceptance process and the full-blown Experience Cloud solution to get the course set up including the class time slots, nominating teaching assistants, contracts, and other essential course details.
The full solution successfully went live in January 2024—and over the past twelve months, Harvard DCE has reviewed over 3,000 course proposals and executed over 2,000 contracts.
“The error rate in publishing courses to our catalog has been reduced to less than 1%. In addition, all stakeholders now have access to the entire decision-making process internally and can more easily and inclusively participate in discussions around course decisions. Faculty appreciate the transparency of the lifecycle process that affords them easy access to the tasks they need to complete in order to deliver a course,” said Lisa Klein Pearo, Senior Associate Dean, Faculty and Academic Affairs, Harvard DCE.
Harvard DCE staff played an instrumental role in the successful execution of the project, with Pearo serving as the executive project sponsor. Alongside her, Harvard DCE CIO Tim Kelley drove the technical evaluation, and Jim Kimmell, Director of Enterprise Systems, was involved in the technical decisions. Kim Edelman, Director of Project Management and IT Strategy, served as project manager from start to finish, managing the RFP and selection process as well as the Harvard DCE team’s involvement to ensure the project was kept on track. Attain Partners also worked closely with Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) for data mapping and campus solutions, the Payroll Department for instructional staff contracts, and Harvard DCE’s Admin Services.
While Faculty Management is not a common use of Salesforce, everyone involved is excited to see how this professional interface will continue to help Harvard DCE improve operational efficiency, staff satisfaction, and morale for years to come.
A relationship 10 years strong
Attain Partners has served as a trusted Salesforce partner to Harvard DCE since 2015. With a proven track record of successful implementations, Attain Partners has fostered a deep sense of trust with Harvard DCE staff and allowed them to explore innovative solutions for their program submission process.
Together, Harvard DCE and Attain Partners have successfully designed and implemented solutions in Marketing Cloud, migrated to EDA, helped improve the student portal with checklists, moved off TargetX and rearchitected the solution, and helped Harvard DCE become one of the first institutions to implement Student Success Hub.
Attain Partners – Digital Transformation Experts
No matter if your organization is beginning its digital transformation journey or 10+ years into driving sustained change, Attain Partners is here to help you achieve your goals.
Driving digital transformation from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions to Data Services, Analytics, and Applications Modernization, Attain Partners provides end-to-end solutions that help advance our clients’ important missions.
Under the strategic leadership of Partner Reshma Patel-Jackson, our Attain Digital practice aligns Attain Partners’ core digital and transformation services to enhance market focus and emphasize delivery excellence, addressing diverse client needs and providing enterprise-wide strategy and technology transformation expertise at scale.
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