Building the internal case for a degree planning and student success platform involves more than identifying a problem. You need to quantify the cost of the current state, align stakeholders with different priorities, and give leadership a clear picture of what success looks like.
This template walks through each step including:
- A current state assessment with formulas for calculating things like staff efficiency loss and enrollment leakage
- An ideal solution checklist and vendor evaluation scorecard
- A stakeholder value map
- A mutual action plan with milestones from alignment through go-live
This template is built for the people doing the internal work to move a platform decision forward. Typically someone in academic affairs, the registrar's office, advising leadership, or IT. It's also useful for anyone who needs to bring an executive sponsor up to speed or align stakeholders across divisions before a formal evaluation begins.
Frequently asked questions
Start by documenting the current state in terms that resonate with finance and leadership — not just operational friction, but what it costs. That means quantifying things like advisor hours spent on transactional work, credits at risk from registration gaps, and staff time tied up in manual exception handling. From there, define what success looks like for each stakeholder group, identify your evaluation criteria, and map a realistic timeline from alignment to go-live. This template walks through each of those steps with prompts and formulas you fill in with your own numbers.
A formal evaluation involves people with different priorities — registrars, IT, advising leadership, finance, and an executive sponsor who may only engage near the end. Without a shared document capturing the problem, the cost of inaction, and what a good solution looks like, those conversations tend to restart from scratch at every stage. A business case gives your internal team a single source of truth and gives leadership what they need to move forward.
The capabilities that tend to separate platforms are the ones that get skipped in a standard demo: whether the degree audit and the student planner share the same data model, how curriculum updates move from the registrar to the student-facing audit, and how exceptions are routed and tracked end to end. The evaluation scorecard in this template covers those criteria alongside security, SIS integration, and advisor workflow so you can score vendors on what actually matters for your campus.