HEFCE & AUDE

HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) and AUDE (Association of University Directors of Estates). Niddocks were selected as strategic IT partners by the consultants leading this project, RSM Robson Rhodes, an international consultancy firm.

The Brief

To design and develop an Internet based application for the provision of estates management good practice information and an online self assessment system for 200 Higher Education Estate Managers. The total development time for the project was restricted to 5 months due to the scheduled launch of the toolkit at the AUDE annual conference, in April 2007.

The Approach

Niddocks worked alongside the consultants to develop the technical specification for the project and assisted in the tender process. A thorough analysis of the project was undertaken to ensure all elements of the project could be developed, tested and delivered on time and within budget.

Milestones were agreed with the project consultants and project management portal was setup to facilitate communication between all parties involved in the project.

Following a research phase Niddocks selected an open source framework that would allow the development of a robust yet rich internet application. With the use of technologies such as AJAX Niddocks has developed a web application that has the interactivity and power of a desktop application but the ease of use and availability of a web site. It is a true of example of Web 2.0; the future of the websites and internet applications.

Some of the application features include role based authentication, CMS (content management system with version control and reviewing), questionnaire interface with live results, result analysis and graphing, benchmarking against peers, historical benchmarking and integration of good practice content into the questionnaire.