Success Story Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna
In perfect collaboration to system implementation in record time
Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna presented us with a particularly great challenge in the second half of 2018 with the wish to be able to start operating a campus management system as early as the summer semester of 2019. We accepted the challenge and in collaboration with the great team at SFU we succeeded in putting academyFIVE into operation in record time.
The University
In addition to the world's first full degree programme in psychotherapy science, Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna, accredited since 2005, has three other faculties: Medicine, Psychology and Law. It also has other campuses in Linz, Berlin, Paris, Ljubljana and Milan with a total of around 4,000 students. Before the introduction of academyFIVE, SFU used a combination of different systems, depending on the faculty. Furthermore, the learning management system Moodle was in use and needed to be connected to the future campus management software.
The challenge
Even the introduction of a largely standardised campus management system requires a certain amount of time. It must be agreed in detail which modules and functions the system must provide. These modules must then be configured based on specific process descriptions, and existing data must be merged from previous systems and migrated into the campus management system. Last but not least, the university administration staff must also be intensively trained – after all, the best system is of little use if no one can use it. Achieving all of this within six months requires not only very good organisation, but above all intensive collaboration – because you don't achieve difficult goals on your own. Within this tight schedule, an interface to Moodle also needed to be developed so that grades and assessments could be transferred directly from Moodle to academyFIVE.
The solution
Our hybrid project management methods basically make it possible for us to ensure short implementation runtimes in every project. Nevertheless, SFU's goal was also very physically demanding for us, which we would not have been able to achieve without the university's great collaboration. No matter how promising applied methods are, they only work if there is also an active and flexible team on the customer side. Thus, academyFIVE was able to go live with the basic system and course management at the medical faculty after only six months, thanks to very close coordination, many workshops and training sessions, efficient prioritisation, and SFU's willingness to adopt best practice examples and tweak its own structures. The other faculties followed just one semester later. Now, additional modules are gradually being introduced and the campus management system is being extended to the Linz and Berlin campuses. Subsequently, an Italian extension is planned for the Milan site.
The customer's conclusion
On the customer side, the project was managed by Ms Ivana Madic (Head of Software Development) and Ms Sanela Cavarusic (Head of Study Operations Organisation). Both are convinced that the campus management software academyFIVE was instrumental in optimising and harmonising their internal university processes.
‘We were faced with the challenge of introducing a uniform system for very different processes at our faculties. And we had a large amount of data to transform from different systems. We managed to transfer all data to academyFIVE error-free and consistently in a short time. The faculties were thus able to use the new system without restriction from the very beginning’, Madic emphasises. ‘The employees quickly got used to the new campus management system.’
‘For teaching operations, the introduction of academyFIVE has brought a significant increase in efficiency’, says Cavarusic. ‘Everything is more bundled, more compact, clearer, and a lot has been automated. As a result, work steps have been reduced and optimised. The communication channels of academyFIVE save a lot of emails and phone calls. academyFIVE is now the source for other systems, such as Moodle or MS Office365.’
‘Ultimately, it was and is important for us’, says Madic, ‘that Simovative offers its customers the opportunity to contribute their own ideas to the further development of the software – we rate this collaboration as very positive. We also benefit from the wishes of other customers.’
Sigmund Freud Private University
Vienna - Austria
