What’s the Winning Formula?
At CedarCrestone Higher Education we aspire to be the trusted advisor to our clients – past, present and future. Being a client’s trusted advisor is, in fact, mission critical for us. We want higher education key stakeholders to know that they can call on us for help, guidance, or advice whether what they need is in our wheelhouse or not. If we need to engage other firms to assist clients, we’ll do that. But first and foremost, we aspire to be the entity that Higher Education can trust for sound advice. And for that, we believe we’ve developed a winning formula.
People + Passion
What’s the most important variable in the trusted advisor equation? We believe it lies in our people. Our clients’ experience of us as a trusted advisor must be present with every CedarCrestone team member at all tiers of our organization. Consequently, the hiring model for our higher education practice springs from and fulfills that fundamental commitment. We seek out and foster people who are passionate about higher education, understand higher education, and have come up through higher education.
The leadership within CedarCrestone’s Higher Education practice includes such people. Liz Dietz, John Harrison, Todd McElroy, and Elizabeth Thompson each have a strong history of passion for Higher Education. Each leads critical areas of our practice that together form a world-class, client-centric organization.
Taking Our Needs Out of the Equation
In the initial stages of a client relationship, there are a number of points of contact that contribute to the fulfillment of our client’s vision. On the front line every day are our business development managers. Most have worked with higher education for many years. They understand the business, understand the people and have deep relationships across the country. They are not focused on promoting our company, but rather, on listening to our clients, understanding their challenges and communicating them back to our organization.
From there, we match the needs of the client with services that we provide, or when important to the overall solution, with services provided by others. We review the need and craft the optimal solution for that client. Sometimes we may even recommend that a client wait to upgrade or implement. We will not rush something just because we want the business. That’s what it means to be a trusted advisor.
Multiplying the Value
Assuming the solution is something we can directly provide, it then migrates to a consultant presence. This presence may include account management, project management, consulting or a combination. The bottom line is CedarCrestone people, on the ground, focused on the client’s need with a defined strategy to provide the overall solution. This is our top priority.
Our practice of hiring people, who understand higher education and are passionate about making a difference for our clients, extends to our selection of account managers, project managers, and consultants. When assigned to a client effort, our team members are not merely focused on software setup; they are focused on business process. Their initial goal is to analyze the institution’s business processes and pinpoint the source of the pain or opportunity. They then design a business process and technology fit that ends the pain and serves the mission.
If someone gives you fish to satisfy your hunger, a dependency is formed. On the other hand, when that person teaches you how to catch your own fish and gives you a map to the best fishing spots, a trusting partnership is formed. Our consultants provide a total solution, ensuring the appropriate knowledge transfer along the way, so that the client owns that solution and is able to maintain it going forward.
Ensuring Client Success
As with the most reliable hardware systems, our people system is built with multiple redundancies, checks and balances that ensure project effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately, client success. For example, we provide a quality assurance program involving a separate, objective layer of people, who speak periodically with both the client and our consultants. They make sure that we’re focused on the client’s top priorities, utilizing best practices and methodologies, and driving the solution that the client wants and expects.
Our project managers are a big part of that solution too. They make sure that the right focus is maintained throughout our efforts. Our project managers typically evolve into the role by wearing a variety of hats (admissions, student records, financial aid, advising) while serving in our broadest tier of consultants. They also receive specialized project management training and certifications. The result is a broad knowledge base for understanding both client need and delivery.
Then there are our account managers. They own client success and satisfaction and support the project from the initial understanding of need through completion, ensuring that delivery is provided on time and on budget according to the client’s expectations.
The Market Leadership Factor
Being knowledgeable about the higher education market – its current state and its future – is critical to our mission as the trusted advisor. To that end, we are always talking to our clients and partners. Certainly there’s no crystal ball telling us where the market will be five years from now, but we have the right people talking to enough people within the industry to have a pretty good sense of where things are heading. We share this knowledge with our clients.
Relationships and Results
We often talk about relationships and results – the combination is a driving factor for us. We want to know that our clients are satisfied, that they feel good about what we have done, that we’ve established positive relationships throughout the process, and that we’ve provided results – high value results.
And if we do all these things right, it positions us very well to be the trusted advisor to higher education.
----
About Chris Ahern
Chris Ahern, Higher Education General Manager for CedarCrestone, blogs about CedarCrestone’s vision, direction and commitments as the trusted advisor for the colleges and universities that we serve. CedarCrestone has completed over 1000 implementation and upgrades projects for more than 300 colleges.
----
First posted to CedarCrestone blog : December 15, 2011