Bringing complex processes to life

Communicating new funding processes was a challenge for the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) project team, who required buy in from staff and sign off from key stakeholders before they could move to the next stage of system development.
The Sysdoc Change Manager suggested an innovative visual story telling technique and worked with the Sysdoc Digital team to deliver a compelling story, resulting in speedy sign off.
The TEC allocates over $3 billion a year in tertiary education funding. It's a big job, particularly as the process of allocating and tracking tertiary funding needs to work efficiently for over 700 different tertiary education organisations across a variety of funds.
When it came time to explain how the new system and processes would work, there was a lot to explain and the project team knew staff would not want to wade through pages and pages of requirements and diagrams. And reviewing the documentation certainly wouldn't create enthusiasm for the changes to come.

The Sysdoc Digital team worked alongside the Sysdoc Change Manager to create a cartoon strip to show how the system was designed to work. A meeting room was turned into a 'model office' - wallpapered with a large-scale version of the cartoon story and with a proof of concept version of the proposed system. By walking staff through the stories, the project team was able to verify what would work, at the same time as building confidence in the proposed systems and processes.
The comics were very well received. Staff could identify themselves in the process, and the sign off process was fast and smooth. The project team could move on to development stage with confidence.