At the recent Tribal Empower HE Conference 2024, delegates heard from Tribal CTO Adam Fox regarding their roadmap for 2024-27.
The 4 key takeaways from this were:
1: Tribal are planning two updates per year for SITS, with each update providing a raft of new API’s and features, focusing on different functionality, contributing to all areas of the student lifecycle.
2: SITS is moving to a new pricing model, called the Higher Education Full-Service model – HEFS (which universities will need to adapt to, but aims to reduce total costs in the long run). It’s designed to help customers get more value from Tribal solutions by bundling licenses and offering professional services aimed at minimising technical debt, along with standardised solutions for end-to-end processes, simplifying cloud migration pathways. Tribal expects to move customers onto HEFS by August 2025.
3: Tribal are urging more organisations to move to Tribal Cloud Services, leveraging cloud tools, reducing complexity, focusing on cyber security, increasing resilience, and reducing risk.
4: Tribal are promoting Tribal:SITS Blueprint, their strategic framework to help organisations implement and configure the SITS software more effectively. The Blueprint is designed to optimise the deployment of SITS by offering best practices, predefined processes, templates, and configurations tailored to the specific needs of HEI’s.
Performing updates of SITS, migration to SITS Cloud, or switching to SITS Blueprint, requires a well-thought-out approach to change management that addresses technical, operational, and strategic considerations.
A significant part of this approach involves developing a comprehensive testing plan that includes unit testing, system testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT), covering all critical functionalities and customisations. Comprehensive testing can minimise risks and disruptions, deliver improved user experience, evidence that the system continues to meet an organisation’s needs effectively, while also ensuring a swift adoption of the new update or migration.
Similarly, the formation and adoption of well-designed automated and regression testing can bring about great efficiencies in regular test cycles, on average reducing 3 weeks of manual effort to just 3 hours. The costs saved by doing this testing can help to mitigate the cost increases from the new pricing model.
As Tribal’s strategic testing partner, Infuse has worked with many organisations, to ensure that Tribal:SITS functions correctly, securely, and efficiently within the higher education environment. We also mitigate the risks of errors, data breaches, and operational disruptions, potentially leading to severe consequences for organisations and stakeholders.
Infuse has been working with universities across the country for over 14 years with evidence of great working partnerships, delivery of requirements, and provision of quality and assured outcomes for organisations to successfully achieve aspired business outcomes on the links below.
– Click here to watch our video case study with KCL to learn how we helped them save money and drive efficiency through testing (14 mins 51 secs)