Statewide Student Success Technology Procurement

Client: Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). Co-facilitated with Marty Alvarado, Jobs for the Future (JFF). Scope: cross-system facilitation, stakeholder engagement, RFP development, vendor evaluation support and implementation readiness. The challenge: Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges used different approaches to student success technology, which made data integration, reporting and coordinated student support difficult.  After a statewide commitment to pursue a common platform with two-way ctcLink integration, SBCTC needed a process to align diverse institutional perspectives, define shared requirements and support a transparent procurement, while respecting real differences in practice, capacity and readiness for change.

The approach: co-facilitated a systemwide process with representatives from all 34 colleges across student services, instruction, finance and IT, and facilitated working sessions to develop and prioritize functional requirements for the RFP. The final RFP included 188 response requests. An initial request for information drew 15 vendor responses; 10 complete RFP responses were then received and scored, including functionality and accessibility testing.