Group of 8 Tertiary Institution​

Challenge

Our customer (a Top 8 University) commenced a program to migrate all on-premise workloads to cloud, adopt modern ways of working and enable self-service cloud services for users across the University, with the objective of building internal capability to enable self-sufficiency.

To support these strategic objectives, DigiRen were engaged in April 2023 to design, build and operationalise a “Cloud Capability Build” program.

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Action

The “Cloud Capability Build” Program was specifically designed to uplift cloud skills & capabilities across the customers cloud consumer teams.

Our activities included:

• Establishing a skills working group that encompassed leaders from across business units to ensure active sponsorship and engagement.

• Designing a role-based capability matrix based on the capabilities required based on new ways of working.

• Curating Learning Pathways in collaboration with SMEs, resulting in four key personas

• Creation of Six 6-weeks learning pathways and seven 12-week learning pathways, with each pathway including a blended curriculum of formal vendor training courses and customised ‘in-house’ courses.

• Designing a mentoring program pairing participants with SMEs to shadow their work and provide on-the-job coaching and feedback

• Completing a skills assessment of all participants

• Creating a customised learning path for each participant

• Developing and monitoring success metrics.

• Designing 10 customer specific eLearning modules to provide crucial internal context to external vendor training and certification. The 10 custom modules created included:

1. Introduction to Cloud

2. Shared Responsibility Model & Guardrails

3. Introduction to Compliance: Patching, Backup & Tagging

4. Understanding your first VPC

5. Architecture: Best Practice Architecture

6. Architecture: Design & Delivery

7. Security Overview

8. Security: Getting your applications onto the Cloud

9. Security: Managing Your Applications on the Cloud

10. Introduction to Cloud Account Product

• Creating a pilot program for 47 employees to test and validate the program, providing weekly feedback and informing improvements.

• Scaling the capability program across the organisation

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The program was rolled out over a staggered 6-month period. Participants joined a 6-week or 12-week cohort based on their role. Cohorts had the opportunity to learn from each other, apply their capability, support each other with challenging assignments and jointly explore new ways of working. This additional social aspect of learning was designed to facilitate change, increase participation and reinforce team behaviours.

Outcomes

The program is ongoing, but has delivered the following results to date:

• 238 participants, including 28 Leaders.

• 30% on average growth in knowledge

• 92% of leaders felt better prepared to implement

• 98% of participants praised the content and design of the learning experience

• 96% said they would recommend it to colleagues

Additionally, improved technical understanding in the leadership team has enhanced the adoption of modern ways of working and enabled leaders to guide teams effectively, increasing engagement across the organisation.

DigiRen capability programs are designed to enable people with traditional IT skills to develop the modern skills required to thrive in the current cloud-based IT landscape. The focus of our work is to enable our customers to do more with the same, ensuring ongoing employment but uplifting the organisational capability to deliver better outcomes.