Overview
Located on the central coast of New South Wales, Green Point Christian College was established over 40 years ago. A K-12 school offering HSC, they have a special commitment to shaping students in accordance with their graduate profile and direct energy to helping students make a difference in the world, that is, to ‘Equip Students for Life’.
Business Challenge
Green Point Christian College (GPCC) has grown substantially over the last couple of years and considered it was time to seek an external perspective on the stability of current IT systems, and to see where the College needed to further develop its systems to support an expanding student and staff population.
“Schools are more complex than most corporates because of the volume of applications and systems we are supporting. We wanted to do a ‘health check’ to see if our systems were up to the task moving forward.”
GPCC also sought an experienced partner to assess its capacity to implement an IT solution in support of the establishment and development of a new governance and leadership foundation (The Melos Foundation) for a group of schools.
“Both our own school and the new governance and leadership foundation need reliable IT to support growth, facilitate operations and ensure that schools within the group can access those resources.”
As GPCC will effectively be delivering a managed service provision led by other experts in the field, the supporting IT needs to have an equally exemplary quality and functionality.
The Solution
NetStrategy performed an audit and health check of GPCC’s current operating systems and network to both celebrate the successes, and to identify any risks and ensure the framework was in place to nurture future growth. NetStrategy’s Education Strategic ICT Review delivered an expert assessment with a detailed and honest report offering the senior staff the information needed to make the right decisions moving forward.
“They helped us identify not just risks but wins and opportunities so we can articulate where we need future development. We know we can trust the findings provided by NetStrategy because they offer an expert objective perspective with no other agenda than to provide information and actionable intelligence. We were very happy with the value that came from the report. It was presented with sufficient detail and relevant recommendations, and ultimately saved us time and money in attempting to achieve the same outcome with internal staff. We couldn’t have done it ourselves without compromising other objectives and projects.”
GPCC’s systems were identified as stable which was encouraging for the team. The assessment assured GPCC that their existing technology was strong enough to confidently enter a new phase of their operation – setting up a leadership service and governance structure for a group of schools. Part of NetStrategy’s solution was to assist GPCC in scaling its current ICT network and support operations to support ongoing access to critical services for all users.
“We want the capacity to deliver on this vision for our foundation, and NetStrategy has helped us identify how to strengthen our existing operations so this foundation can flourish. Good governance can be compromised by poor operational systems.”
GPCC also understood its own IT limitations and sought reliable expertise and support from a broad range of experts.
“Gone are the days when an internal IT department can do everything. Many enterprises need to recognise it is not physically possible to know everything about everything, nor provide the necessary internal staff resources to complete all required tasks. IT is now incredibly complex. We know they’ve got experts in every field so we can call on the right person.”
The Benefits
The team at GPCC has evidence that their systems are stable and can continue to reliably serve the school’s growing population. They also have the confidence to scale their leadership foundation with strong operations.
“NetStrategy are not just engineers, they also understand school IT governance and have actually supported us to deliver on our core purpose as an organisation.” – Mr Michael Lowbridge, Business Manager, GPCC
