working together to drive meaningful change in your organisation.

Running an educational institution takes a lot of resources, which can make it tough to implement new initiatives. That’s why we’re here to help — let us support you in your efforts to create positive change.

what is the benefit of working with our team?

Before engaging Karana

Picture this: you’re a staff member at a university, and you want to drive initiatives that you know will improve the experience at your institution.

Unfortunately, you’re coming up against some roadblocks:

  • There’s not enough time and focused attention for people to progress these initiatives and projects.

  • Deadlines are frequently adjusted and pushed out.

  • Staff currently lack the appropriate skills, experience, and confidence to take the necessary actions to progress initiatives, including engaging and managing key stakeholders.

  • Assumptions and past information are used for rationales by senior leadership, which dilutes the importance and urgency of issues, and things get moved down the priority list.

After engaging Karana

Now imagine this: Karana comes in, helping your team get focused on a specific project, which means appropriate time and attention are given, resulting in actions and progress.

With their extensive higher education experience, Karana understands how to help you navigate the complexities and nuances of driving change within universities, giving you the confidence that they can get through to and build relationships with your key stakeholders.

By implementing HCD and pretotyping, your university can collect current information that is accurate, relevant, and contextual, allowing you to address short and medium-term issues that capture people’s attention, particularly senior leaders who can see improvement and progress.

Projects are time-boxed over several months with regular progress reports provided, and constraints are used as assets to drive projects forward.

Step 1: Identification

We run a discovery session together, working out and understanding the pain points within your organisation so that we can come up with a plan to address the unique needs of your institution and how we can reach your business goals.

Step 2: Confirmation

We synthesise everything we learned during discovery, ensuring that everyone is aligned with the project details, scope, timelines, stakeholders and plans around communication so that we can get started.

Step 3: Implementation

This is the fun part — taking the plan into action! We undertake each task in the project, regularly updating teams and senior leadership on our progress through meetings and reports. There will be several checkpoint milestones where we can check in and ensure everyone is still aligned with the project goals. We offer you complete transparency with this approach — everyone will always be aware of where the project is at, including issues and wins. And if problems do arise, you can rest assured that Karana has it covered.

Step 4: Communication

You won’t be left in the dark with Karana — we believe in open and responsive communication through the appropriate channels, ensuring all key stakeholders are involved in the project and can ask questions when needed.

Step 5: Documentation

Throughout the project, we will document everything to ensure all learnings are carried forward into the future. We will provide you with progress reports and a final report (depending on your requested format). Karana will also hold a presentation on the project findings and outcomes for your organisation and all relevant stakeholders.

Step 6: Finalisation

It’s time to wrap up! We’ll close off the project with a meeting giving you the opportunity to provide us with feedback and for us to collect any lessons you’ve learned from the process along the way. Here, we’ll also discuss next steps, if required. And, if you ever have questions or need advice down the track about the project, or you’re looking to start another, we’ll be right here, ready to help you out.

common questions about our process.

  • We can embed ourselves into your teams in a variety of ways depending on your project needs – check out our services for details. At the end of the engagement, we deliver agreed outcomes, such as a final report and presentations, as well as the project closure tasks outlined above.

  • It boils down to three main issues:

    1. People are burnt out and exhausted. Staff operating in ‘business-as-usual’ mode have too many things going on, and not enough time and ability to focus to deliver on initiatives.

    2. Universities have lost a lot of people and corporate knowledge. New staff are struggling to learn their roles and look ahead, so there’s been a major loss of capability.

    3. Strategic alignment of new initiatives can be lost if the business case isn’t strong. The student experience is a top priority for all universities, especially after COVID, so engaging students to understand their pain points and how to reduce friction in their experience will benefit universities greatly.

  • While we specialise in helping the education sector, our methods are applicable across industries. Through HCD and Pretotyping, we can help any organisation looking to embed changes that will make a difference to the people they touch.

Ready to be a ‘change agent’ for your organisation?