Looking to the future, the Further Education sector faces many challenges:

• Funding constraints leave no room for inefficient processes within the teaching and support environments.
• The expectations of client organisations and students for a quality learning experience will increase in line with their contribution towards course costs.
• Being ‘demand lead’ and meeting the needs of businesses means that some internal processes and systems must become much more ‘customer centric’.

TMG has a proven track-record in addressing organisational process and information systems issues that are part of the solution.

• Engineering out’ inefficient and ineffective processes that incur cost yet add no value.
• Developing architectures for information systems that maximise the organisational value of your data, information and knowledge.
• Designing ‘best practice’ learner facing processes – consistent and well understood – promoting a quality learning experience.

TMG offers a range of services within the Education sector:

• Process Improvement & Redesign
• Information Systems Planning
• Information Systems Design
• Development of Standard Operating Procedures
• Knowledge Management
• Website Design & Development
• Intranet Design
• Technical Authoring
• Best Practice in IT Support

TMG experience within the Education sector:

Throughout our long standing relationships in education, the private sector, the emergency services, housing associations, charities and youth organisations we have been the catalyst for major improvements in many areas. Some examples of our assignments are as follows:

• Standard Operating Procedures
  TMG was engaged by Ufi, the organisation behind learndirect, to work with learning centres to develop, define and document a set of Standard Operating Procedures that would underpin a quality focussed approach to the delivery and support of learning from initial advice and guidance through to completion and achievement.
  
  The assignment involved a systems specification to ensure that funding and audit information requirements were met.
  
  
• Process Improvement
  To become a learndirect learning centre, potential training organisations undergo a development program to prepare them for delivery of learndirect products and services. TMG was engaged by Ufi to re-engineer the underlying processes in order to reduce the overall bureaucracy and improve the quality of the process.
  
  
• Systems Design and Development
  TMG developed and implemented centinel, a web enabled system that is in use across more than 2500 learndirect centres in England and Wales. Centinel is used to drive and control processes throughout a centre’s development.
  
  
• Systems Support and Hosting
  TMG provides cost effective systems support and hosting services to clients in the public and private sector. For Ufi, TMG provides a hosting and support service for all users of the centinel application.
  
  
• Knowledge Management and Intranet Content
  Knowledge management is concerned with an organisation’s approach to the sharing and using information and knowledge. Commonly, organisations are using intranets to capitalise on the knowledge held by its employees. For Ufi, TMG developed intranet content in a number of forms including on-line users’ guides, business process guides and operating procedures.
  
  
• Best Practice in IT Operations
  Inefficient support of the IT infrastructure often leads to frustration and disillusionment amongst support and teaching staff. As a consequence, the organisation incurs ‘stealth costs’ – these are the hidden costs, never reflected in the management accounts - that are a result of lost productivity as end users attempt to find their own solutions to problems experienced with hardware and software.
  
  TMG’s experience in ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), an internationally recognised standard in the support and operation of IT infrastructures allows us to help educational establishments implement IT operational best practice across its many dimensions.