DALLAS COLLEGE
192 been especially important thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic . “ It made it easier for us to transition a lot of students online when the pandemic hit ,” says Marshall . “ We were in the middle of the semester when we shut down all of our campuses . We had to take 60,000 students in two weeks and move them online . Because of the cloud nature of Blackboard , the platform was able to rather quickly scale up their systems to take on all those extra students .”
The pandemic has naturally impacted the organization , as it has with essentially all centers of education worldwide . In this case , it ’ s brought a number of projects to the front of the line . “ One of them is changing from seven separate colleges into one college , with seven campuses . Up until March of this year , each one of those colleges ran their own IT shops . When we all came together and we were all working remotely , it was rather apparent that we should immediately centralize - as opposed to waiting for a year or two .”
With years of experience managing global teams in consulting firms ,
Marshall is confident in the efficacy of remote working , provided the technology is in place to support it . “ We ’ ve had to condition a lot of software products so that they make sense for everybody . Virtual white boarding for agile development , for instance . I don ’ t have that physical presence now , so we ’ ve become much more project oriented than we were in the past .”
Going forward , Marshall sees that remote trend replicated in the
FEBRUARY 2021