Portland Community College (PCC) is a public community college in Portland, Oregon. As the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon, PCC serves nearly 70,000 full-time and part-time students.
Challenge
The PCC CIO was tasked with piloting a solution for improving information management and content-driven workflows for two college departments -- the College Policy Advisory Committee (CPAC) and the Grants department.
Story
The College Policy Advisory Committee (CPAC) manages all of PCC’s operational policies, for which there are numerous compliance requirements. CPAC employees were spending an inordinate amount of time manually managing policy documents and associated workflows, and the department could not enforce access controls or provide a unified approach for storing content. In addition, they wanted to move their content to a more secure environment.
PCC was also facing a new challenge. The Oregon Community College Association (OCCA) was about to roll out new rules, requiring significant changes to the way the organization works.
“With the new OCCA rules going into effect, as many as 600 new policies and procedures will impact how we manage our programs and operations,” said Tracy Walstead, CPAC Administrator. “AODocs currently addresses policy management at PCC, which is very dynamic -- this is the nature of our work. I needed a platform that was flexible enough to adapt and evolve with us, but stable enough to help us ensure we stay in compliance.”
The Grants Office wanted to improve the ability for its staff to search for and access content among its vast array of existing content and data silos. They sought a platform that would enable them to better structure their library and make it easy to bring new documentation from file shares into a controlled and secure environment.
As PCC evaluated its options, it considered Box but found it didn’t have the workflow capabilities they needed. After investigating a range of solutions, the IT team chose AODocs. One factor driving the decision was AODocs’ tight integration with Google Drive. With PCC transitioning towards greater use of Google tools, the AODocs platform not only aligned with the organization’s IT plans, but also promised to make onboarding easier for PCC’s Googlesavvy users.
The implementation of AODocs was not without its hurdles - transforming any existing process and system to a new platform is challenging, and this was no different. However, in just a few short months, AODocs was proving its value, offering greater efficiency and time savings.
Results
The IT team got off to a quick start, creating workflows within the AODocs platform to standardize the entire grant process -- including documentation standardization, internal and external reviews, and final approval.
PCC does not have a huge IT department waiting for work to do, so utilizing AODocs as the platform for projects that can serve as the foundation for future tasks saved the organization a lot of time. Now, stakeholders in the grant process all use a grant document template -- that resides within, and is controlled by, AODocs -- to input data responses into predetermined fields. When committee reviews on grants are initiated, workflows are now much more efficient and also ensure the highest levels of security.
“AODocs is very robust, and it’s so much more flexible and customizable than any other solution we’ve used in the past,” said Walstead.
“With the AODocs platform as the backbone, our team developed the solution in phases and in an iterative manner -- tweaking our workflows along the way. Within three months, we were using and validating our solution.”
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