A digital gateway with COYO

At a glance

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Users:
1.500

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Launch:
August 2020

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Edition:
COYO Cloud

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Partner:
Kronsteg

The story

A state-of-the-art campus stretches out directly on Lake Constance in Friedrichshafen: Zeppelin University. The private foundation university teaches and conducts research in business, politics and culture. The university emphasizes personal cooperations among students, faculty and staff as one of its greatest values.

Stefanie Zeller, responsible for information technology and e-learning, and Jan Möller, head of IT applications, have set out to transfer this sense of cooperation to the digital world as well.

They set themselves a very athletic goal of introducing a new tool within one semester. After choosing COYO, the two project managers enlisted the help of a certified COYO partner to keep them on target.

The requirements

As a tool for ZU, COYO is to ...

... create exchange among employees and students.
... merge content and make it accessible to all.
... enable collaborations.
... easily and effectively map onboarding processes for employees and students.

Quickly implemented: Sustainability digital

The vision with COYO was a digital hub from which everything for everyday life at the university could be reached. Starting with digital onboarding of employees and students, through information and communications for the respective professional groups, to ZU events. A communication channel to the president of ZU should find its place, as well as the communication of employees and students. With COYO, according to the vision, networking is also easier among each other and the exchange is strengthened. In short: A starting point for all topics at ZU.

"There are many factors to consider, both change management, technical processes, information architecture and structure, and that's where we said before we don't consider something in this big construct, let's get help."

Stefanie Zeller, IT Projektleitung

Taking off with the partner

Together with Kronsteg, the first step was to analyze the university's existing software landscape and take a close look at the existing communication channels.The goal was to harmonize the IT software landscape. This included considering the integration of Microsoft 365 and jumps to other tools. For example, the COYO social intranet was to become the central point of entry and guide for users. In addition, it was important to involve a wide variety of people, from students to administrative staff to professors. Kronsteg was to provide support here through dedicated change management. In the first weeks of the project, Kronsteg's COYO experts were on site a lot: Many interactive workshops took place. ZU upgraded with an interdisciplinary team; in addition to IT, the International Office and Quality Management were also involved, among others.

"It was nice to have someone who could provide new impetus and bring the experience. That was important for us."

During the development of a new dedicated communication structure, very smart ideas kept coming from the COYO partner, the project team led by Stefanie Zeller praises. After only half a year, Kronsteg and the ZU project team have managed to make COYO the central gateway at the university.

"I'm already noticing that COYO is on everyone's lips"

You couldn't ask for a better launch: The feedback was positive all around, the new intranet looks better, it is more modern and easy to understand. While initially there was a lot of project work by the students on Microsoft Teams, after a short time the project team was able to watch the communities grow. The students have become hooked and accept the new tool. The team is happy about that: "When they feel comfortable, you automatically get to a point where they want to do more with the tool themselves, they try it out, think, what would benefit me even more?"

On "Development Day," a task force of students, faculty and staff discusses how Zeppelin University is positioning itself for the future. COYO has also found a permanent place here, and students in particular make many suggestions for using and expanding the platform. The next wish was to activate the chat in COYO, which means that the individual communication islands from Microsoft Teams will also slowly move to COYO and the idea of a Digital Home will be lived.

And the partner? The ZU project team remains in contact with Kronsteg. The partner's valuable experience ultimately led to COYO quickly becoming an integral part of Zeppelin University's culture.