Project Brief

California’s network of 115 Community Colleges (CCC) is the largest system of higher education in the nation with more than 2.1M active students at any one time. In 2016 productOps partnered with the CCC State Chancellor’s Office to help them realize their vision of a cutting-edge grant management platform that would standardize their systems across all campuses and for the first time make possible the ability to quickly and accurately tie specific dollars invested to specific student outcomes. NOVA has become the gold standard of a project that delivers exactly this.

What They Needed

The Chancellor’s office needed a statewide system that would streamline their annual grant issuance, review, and fulfillment process while offering data insights that enabled the state to align college programmatic offerings with local workforce development needs. The solution needed to be accessible, transparent, easy to operate, and scalable as college enrollments fluctuated and additional funding programs were added. It was critical that the State Chancellor be able to direct and re-direct scarce resources to programs that maximize the investments being made by aligning them with real-world need as responsively as possible.

The Solution

The solution was clear but getting there was anything but. The story of NOVA is not a technology story. It’s a people story. Transforming highly political and heavily siloed organizations is art more than science. Over the course of four years, productOps quietly built the underlying NOVA software platform one separate piece at a time while never losing sight of the goal to one day connect the dots. The end result is a unified platform that has been rapidly adopted systemwide. NOVA has maximized the state’s investments through more efficient and relevant program creation, better utilization of resources, and enhanced data management across the entire CCC system. All of this in a platform that is intuitive to operate and loved by the same people who were originally afraid that the platform would replace them. Instead, NOVA has freed them from mundane administrative tasks so they can better fulfill the CCC mission.