Digital Maturity Planner

Empowering NSW schools to define their own digital transformation

The Digital Maturity Planner (DMP) is a tool that helps schools understand their current level of digital maturity, identify gaps and help build and manage a plan that lifts their digital capabilities. Co-designed with schools, it assists Principals and school leadership teams navigate their digital transformation journey through a test designed to assess their school’s digital maturity against department standards and provided dedicated resources delivered across a customisable program to improve performance.

Process: Strategy -> Requirements -> Concept -> Pilot

The Boomworks Fast-track Exploration program was utilised to define a digital maturity concept that reflected the strategic inputs of the departments Schools Digital Strategy aligned to the focus of the Rural Access Gap initiative.

Research and co-design sessions were conducted with school principals, digital support team members, and other relevant department stakeholders to define the problem space and conceive potential solutions. Various interactive concepts were created and reviewed with target users to provide evidence-led decision making for how to proceed to the pilot stage.

To create the initial release of the DMP, the Boomworks Pilot Accelerator program was used to rapidly progress the approved concepts into prototypes and the final release pilot. While this brought the product to market in a strategically rapid way, it also enabled the establishment of the product roadmap and build specification for subsequent major releases.

Outcome: Ongoing design and delivery to support the roadmap

A range of qualitative research sessions were conducted with school principals and department stakeholders throughout the product delivery program to assist with planning, design and development of subsequent releases. One of the key attributes of this approach is that it means the DMP was always evolving in terms of usability and functionality – anticipating and meeting the needs of the users through what became recognised as one of the most challenging periods for education service delivery.

The Digital Maturity Planner program is routinely featured in presentations as an outstanding example of how products and services can be delivered by the department in a user centred, collaborative and iterative way.

Boomworks were engaged across a two-and-a-half-year period to iterate and expand the capabilities of the DMP, culminating in a successful handover to the Department once the product was at full maturity.