Fast-tracking digital success: Morley College London's automation journey

Georgina00:00

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining FlowForma's session. We're going to be talking about fast-tracking digital success, and in particular looking at Morley College London's automation journey over the next half an hour or so.

Georgina00:11

Welcome to Will Johnson, head of information services at Morley College London, who's joining us along with Niamh Lordan, head of marketing at FlowForma. It's brilliant to have you both with us. Niamh, I'll hand over to you to guide us through what we're going to look at.

Niamh Lordan00:41

Thanks, Georgina. The spotlight of our session today is an interview with Will Johnson from Morley College. But before we deep dive into the interview, I'd like to give a brief introduction to FlowForma, just to set some context.

Niamh Lordan00:57

FlowForma is a powerful and intuitive platform for digitalizing business processes, from the simple to the very complex. From day one, FlowForma has been about empowering both IT leaders and business leaders to automate at speed. We're passionate about no-code, and the fact that process designers don't need to spend a lot of time coding to automate their processes.

Niamh Lordan01:33

Another important point about the FlowForma product is that it's an all-in-one platform. Within the platform we have forms, workflow, insights and document generation, so everything is in one place, in one toolkit.

Niamh Lordan01:49

Recently, with all the interest in AI and faster automation, we've transformed the product with an AI layer. Our AI suite is made up of FlowForma Copilot, AI agents and AI assistants, and they're all within the product now to help people automate and optimize even faster. So it's great timing to have Will here today, because I don't think there's ever been a more exciting time to start an automation journey.

Niamh Lordan02:30

So let's dive straight into the interview. Will, thank you so much. I know your time is very precious, so we really appreciate you coming on to share your story with us today.

Will Johnson02:45

Glad to be here.

Niamh Lordan02:46

To get started, Will, can you tell us a little about your role at Morley College, and a little more about the college?

Will Johnson02:55

Of course. I'm Will Johnson, head of the information services team at Morley College in London. We're a college of 11,000 students, with a lot more enrollments than that, and around 600 staff members, based over four campuses throughout London.

Will Johnson03:08

I head up a 12-person team, but that maybe gives the wrong impression, because we cover a huge variety of different things. The members of the team actively designing processes with FlowForma are three people, and two of those are doing other things as well, so it's probably the equivalent of about two people. It's a small team.

Niamh Lordan03:36

A small team, and I guess IT teams are always in demand, with not enough time in the day to get everything automated.

Niamh Lordan03:44

Can you tell us a little about your IT environment? What other systems are you responsible for managing?

Will Johnson03:51

As a college, we have a student record system. It goes by lots of other names depending on who you ask, but that's the big one. All of our curriculum data and student data is stored within that system, and it also connects to lots of other systems throughout the college.

Will Johnson04:09

We use Microsoft tools as a baseline as well. One of the things we might come to later is how useful it was that FlowForma lives on top of SharePoint. We have a really wide range of tools, so having something that can talk to lots of different systems was really key.

Niamh Lordan04:33

Integration is always a big topic when people are looking at new platforms. At a high level, FlowForma integrates with multiple systems and sits on top of SharePoint Online, which is always a big plus for organizations like Morley.

Niamh Lordan04:57

Let's move into the challenges Morley was facing. Could you share what your "before" looked like, and what brought you to market for a new process automation tool?

Will Johnson05:06

I'm happy to say we were actually doing quite a lot of automation before moving forward with FlowForma, but it was with some very old tools. The previous tool set was end of life, and had been for a little while, so we were trying to find an equivalent. We were using Nintex, layered on top of Microsoft InfoPath, and InfoPath is very much end of life and not supported.

Will Johnson05:37

We needed something with the flexibility and extensibility of that system, but we also wanted to improve things. We didn't want to just replace like with like. We'd customized that solution to within an inch of its life, it's fair to say, so finding a system like FlowForma that really had the customizability was key for us.

Niamh Lordan06:03

I think a lot of people on this session are also still using InfoPath. We get inquiries on a daily basis, and that deadline is fast approaching. Software consolidation has been a big trend over the last few years, too. Do you have any tips for peers who are thinking, "I have so many tools doing the same thing, how can I consolidate?"

Will Johnson06:38

Unfortunately, consolidation takes a lot of time, but it saves you a lot of time in the long run, so it's definitely important to do. At Morley, we went through a whole process of remapping all of our systems, along with the processes and the staff members who use them.

Will Johnson06:53

That was quite illuminating, because there were a couple of areas where we realized there was obvious duplication. Those are the key targets to knock on the head as soon as possible. Getting everything mapped out, so you can see the scale of the problem, is really important.

Niamh Lordan07:17

Selecting a new platform isn't an easy task, and there's a lot of pressure to choose one that fits your organization. When you realized you needed to move off the older systems, what did you have on your checklist?

Will Johnson07:49

I've touched on the fact that flexibility, or customizability, was really big for us. If you're using a tool for automation, it needs to fit around your existing processes. You can make tweaks to those processes, but they're there for a reason, hopefully, so the tool needs to be as flexible as possible.

Will Johnson08:08

It was also about making sure that designing the flows was as easy as possible. We don't have infinite time to recreate these things, and even with a starting point it's still a lot of work. So it needed to be easy to learn, but with a lot of depth in what's possible. The phrase would be "the art of the possible": we needed to know we could get at least to where we were with the old tools, and ideally move past that.

Will Johnson08:43

And InfoPath was a fantastic tool in its time, which was maybe a decade or so ago, but it doesn't look very nice. If staff are going to use a tool on a daily basis, it needs the look and feel of a modern system.

Niamh Lordan09:03

That's probably the most important piece: getting adoption from students and faculty. And it sounds like Morley had everything very customized to your own needs, so you needed a new platform that could match that level of complexity.

Will Johnson09:24

Sorry to jump in, I realize I missed a very important one. We discussed whether we'd use something simpler and try to work differently, falling back to something like Microsoft Forms. But what we really needed was something that could plug into not just the more obvious systems, like Microsoft tools, but specifically our student record system. Without that, it just wouldn't work.

Will Johnson09:59

We're using what might be the more advanced side of things to make sure FlowForma can talk to our systems and update data directly, because that also saves a lot of time.

Niamh Lordan10:15

Let's jump into the more exciting part. What have you automated so far with the FlowForma platform?

Will Johnson10:25

At the moment we're focusing on the systems and processes my team owns. We've got processes for booking rooms, because timetabling sits within my team. We have curriculum management processes, like changing a course title or the number of students on a course, plus some light timetabling changes.

Will Johnson10:57

And we have lots of changes for student data: transferring students from course to course, withdrawing them from courses when that's necessary, or changing other aspects of their data. Those are the ones we've really pushed on.

Will Johnson11:14

In the future, as well as a few other processes we still need to replace, we want to provide tools for other parts of the business. That's our phase two with FlowForma: providing a service to create flows for other teams. For now, it's mostly processes owned by my team.

Niamh Lordan11:37

That's a huge amount of work when you think about that number of processes across 11,000 students.

Will Johnson11:46

Yes, that's a lot to cover.

Niamh Lordan11:49

I think you're happy to give an exclusive today and show attendees your environment: how you've rolled out FlowForma and matched the look and feel to your visual identity.

Will Johnson12:18

One of the key deciding factors for FlowForma was that it lives on top of SharePoint. We wanted to maintain ownership of the data, so it was very important that it lived on a system we own. This is our landing page, or library, for our forms.

Will Johnson12:46

Hopefully you'll agree it has a nice look and feel. Because it's built in SharePoint, it's easy to edit, as long as you're not trying to do anything completely crazy. We have other SharePoint pages that link to it and vice versa, so it's very easy for staff to find what they need, and when they get there, hopefully it's a good experience.

Will Johnson13:10

I'll show a couple of forms, starting with the room booking form. It's slightly simpler, so it's a good place to start for anyone who hasn't seen FlowForma before. When you open it, it shows the different steps in the process at the top, and below that is the custom form we've built.

Will Johnson13:40

I mentioned interfacing directly with our student record system. It sounds like a minor thing, but without it your data quality goes out the window. When I click on this drop-down, FlowForma does a SQL lookup to our database and grabs the live list of rooms. Staff can't write something nobody understands, because they have to select from a list.

Will Johnson14:11

And if you know you need a room but not which one, it's searchable. If I start typing "fashion", it finds the fashion room. It's very easy to use from an end user's point of view, and that was a big selling point for us.

Will Johnson14:29

As soon as you select a room, it pre-populates some of these other fields. From a data quality point of view, that's absolutely essential: you limit the possibility space.

Will Johnson14:52

There are other sections, like date and time pickers, and the number of people who'll use the room. In the background, we've checked the room's actual capacity in our database, so if I enter an unrealistic number, a message pops up. There's a lot of flexibility in what's possible; it expands to your imagination, to some extent.

Will Johnson15:28

We make use of lots of the rules built into FlowForma. This field is a lookup of the courses we run in and around London. When I select one, the next field is hidden. The intention is to ask for exactly as much information as you need and no more, so your data quality is better and it's easier for the end user.

Will Johnson16:01

I'm not going to hit submit, because otherwise I'd actually be booking a room and my team would be very confused. But you can see how quickly you can get to where you need to be.

Niamh Lordan16:10

And the validation there is really important. That's a big thing for everyone in our community, and it saves a lot of time at a later stage.

Will Johnson16:25

Let me show one more, slightly more complicated one that we're still actively working on. It's a similar idea, but here we use FlowForma's functionality for parallel steps. When I pick a course, it straight away pre-populates where the course is running and everything else, so the person making the change can confirm they've selected the right one. Avoiding errors comes in many forms.

Will Johnson17:07

Then we can select multiple changes to this course. Here I could change the title of the course: it shows the current title and lets me edit it. At the top there's another step, and it's only showing the options I selected, so again it's only asking for the information that's actually required.

Will Johnson18:00

We've all been in a situation where we've filled in a 15-page paper form, only to realize after 12 pages that just three were relevant. So it's really important to only ask what's necessary.

Will Johnson18:14

You can also add lots of guidance, directly in the tool or as messages next to the relevant fields. We've found that really useful. Rather than running a whole separate training session on a new process, build the documentation directly into the tool. That's been really successful for us.

Will Johnson18:38

And these drop-downs are filtered by what you've entered above. That kind of functionality is only really possible with some of the advanced features FlowForma offers.

Niamh Lordan18:58

Those are brilliant examples: something simple like room booking, and something more complex like curriculum management. I love that there's one central area where faculty and students can access all their processes in one click, and that each user only sees what's important to them, based on their permissions at Morley.

Will Johnson19:38

That's the intention, anyway.

Niamh Lordan19:47

That leads nicely to the business value. What KPIs are you tracking, and what feedback have you had from faculty and leadership on the new, more modern processes?

Will Johnson20:10

It's worth noting that FlowForma has functionality to track how long people spend on each step, which is really useful, but we haven't used it yet, mainly because it wasn't available in the previous system, so we don't have a benchmark. Anecdotally, staff are certainly happier with the new processes. The room booking form especially is night and day better than the old one, and the curriculum management form will be too once it's complete.

Will Johnson20:50

End users prefer it from a usability point of view, and for my team in the back office it's transformative. If you're going to the effort of rebuilding these processes and forms, you'd be silly not to also improve the processes themselves at the same time.

Will Johnson21:11

Turnaround on requests has improved, but the biggest impact is that the system lets us make changes directly. In the old days, a request would come in and, in reality, it just sent a nicely formatted email to a team, and someone had to go and do whatever was requested. With this system, wherever it doesn't need an approval step, and you can still build that in, it just goes and does it, because it can talk directly to our systems.

Will Johnson21:59

That's been the really big win: streamlining the underlying process so that, in an ideal world, a human doesn't have to look at it at all.

Niamh Lordan22:09

I love that: less human intervention. The process is digitalized, you're capturing the right information, and it's pushed and pulled to other systems without anyone needing to get involved.

Will Johnson22:24

The other point is how you can type within a field and search. I'm not aware of another system that does it in that way, and it's been really appreciated by staff.

Niamh Lordan22:40

Has there been any impact on visibility, audit trails or reporting?

Will Johnson22:59

Our old system, Nintex and InfoPath, also stored information in SharePoint, but not in a very user-friendly way. The built-in tools in more modern versions of SharePoint, and what FlowForma layers on top, are much easier to use. We haven't yet needed to audit seriously, but I can say with confidence it'll be a massively improved experience. We've also built custom views into the forms so we can track requests and make sure nothing is forgotten, which is vastly simpler than before.

Niamh Lordan23:44

Automation is a journey, and other customers I've interviewed see a snowball effect: one department sees how a process saved another team time and wants the same. What's next for Morley College?

Will Johnson24:19

There's a two-pronged approach. One is finishing off, or rather continuing to improve, because you never really finish, the forms owned directly by my team. The big one is adding more timetabling functionality to the curriculum management form I showed.

Will Johnson24:45

The other prong is exactly as you said: staff have seen what it could do for their teams and processes. I'm already in conversation with our HR team about changing how they do staff onboarding. I suspect that's a very common use of FlowForma. The special sauce for us is that we could write data directly from those processes into our databases. The only reason we haven't moved forward already is that we're changing our HR system.

Niamh Lordan25:21

One final question. At process excellence events, a challenge I hear a lot is that business people want to automate their processes but don't know how to start mapping them, and that can delay their automation goals. What's your advice on getting started?

Will Johnson26:00

It sounds a bit silly, but mapping the process in the first place is so important. If you start building new flows, or replacing old ones, without sitting down with all the stakeholders who use the tool, front end and back end, you're in for trouble. You need to put the time into mapping the whole process out.

Will Johnson26:29

There are two schools of thought. One is to get everyone in a single physical room with paper and sticky notes you can move around, which is quick. At the end, you take photos and write it up so everyone's on board.

Will Johnson26:49

But lots of tools facilitate it now. At Morley we use Mural, but there are many others. Using something where you can split processes into swim lanes is really powerful, because handoffs between teams are often where the best efficiencies are found. If a process flips back and forth between two teams, ask whether one team could do everything and then hand over to the other.

Will Johnson27:21

A lot of success can come from just mapping out the process. How you do it isn't the important thing. Doing it, and putting the time into doing it well, is what matters most.

Niamh Lordan27:35

Just get it done. And with AI, FlowForma recently launched our AI discovery agent. In those mapping meetings, you can turn on the agent: it listens to the conversation and the brainstorming, and helps rapidly prototype those processes.

Niamh Lordan28:00

We're coming to the end of our session, so I'll invite Georgina back in. Will, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time, and everyone loves to hear real customer stories.

Will Johnson28:14

My pleasure.

Georgina28:16

Thank you very much, Will. That was excellent. Niamh, tell us the next steps, please.

Niamh Lordan28:22

Thanks for joining us. If you're interested in what Will shared today, or you'd like a custom demonstration, or even just a chat about your process challenges, we have experts on hand. Please book a demo or a trial at flowforma.com.

Niamh Lordan28:41

We've also launched a new playground on our homepage. With AI now in the product, you can upload a process diagram, a process document or a text prompt. In this example, using onboarding, which came up earlier, the AI suggests the steps you could have in your process and rapidly prototypes it for you.

Niamh Lordan29:14

Just like you'd use ChatGPT today, you keep prompting and refining the process, and you can see all the steps, questions and logic running in the background. That's a little flavor, and we invite people to try it. That's it from us today.

Georgina29:37

Thank you both very much indeed. Handing back now to the main studio.