Overview

ImaginXP is a leading higher education organization in India that partners with universities to deliver and manage industry-aligned academic programs in emerging fields within Design, Engineering, and Business.

At ImaginXP, partner universities, educators, and academic coordinators often found themselves buried under administrative tasks due to manual-heavy workflows, siloed teams, and low network bandwidth.

I initiated a systems-level study across academic operations to understand inefficiencies and friction points affecting over 200 faculty members across 40+ campuses. Opportunity areas were identified to optimize the tasks, enhance interdepartmental coordination, and reduce fatigue caused by repetitive manual work.

Scope - Systems Research & Opportunity Mapping

Participants - 80 faculties, 8 coordinators across 40 universities

Methods and Tools - Participatory Observation, Contextual Inquiry, Diary Studies, Affinity Mapping, Systems Mapping, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprinting

Inspiration

Faculties across universities and departments often expressed that repetitive administrative tasks consumed a significant portion of their time, reducing their focus from high-impact academic activities such as lesson delivery, content refinement, assignment design, and mentoring students. 

Faculties across the campuses spent 6–8 hours/week on repetitive admin work, often due to:

  • Maintaining analog documentation

  • Re-entering the same information in different formats (ERP, Excel sheets)

  • Manually backing up records due to frequent system failures

  • Switching between WhatsApp, Teams, and email for updates and coordination

  • Co-ordinate with different departments for fresh data updates

Expected Outcomes

This effort aimed to generate dual outcomes:

  1. For Business - Improved cross-functional coordination, timely data access, and reduced operational bottlenecks.

  2. Human Centric - Restoring cognitive bandwidth, reducing fatigue, and enhancing satisfaction and performance.

Key Findings and Recomendations

Hybrid workflows weaken focus

82 % of faculty toggled between digital and analog tools such as LMS portals, Excel sheets, WhatsApp logs, and paper registers multiple times per day.

Offline First → Duplication Cycle

In campuses with low bandwidth, faculty began tasks on local spreadsheets and uploaded data later, causing an average 2× duplication of entries.

Siloes and dependencies

Academic coordinators required two or more follow‑up requests each time to gather updated student records and course materials from faculty, often via ad‑hoc calls.

Shared‑drive frustrations

Faculty and coordinators relied on a single shared drive for all academic records, and 61 % said they encountered at least one incident each month where files were moved, overwritten, or deleted by others. The result was compounded frustration, lost confidence in one source of truth, and additional manual backups further fueling the cycle of siloed workarounds.

HMW help faculty capture daily teaching, attendance, and communication updates without needing to jump between tools?

HMW assign operational support to assist with manual-to-digital translation?

HMW reduce dependency loops and improve visibility?

HMW maintain structured, role-specific repositories with access governance?

Reflection

Don’t Just Be a Part of the System. Step Back to See It Holistically

This project reaffirmed something I deeply believe: when working with complex, slow-moving institutions, it’s easy to get absorbed into the day-to-day frictions. Real value emerges when we step back and look at the system as a whole. Mapping relationships, surfacing invisible labor, and zooming out to view policy, process, and human dynamics together, I could see how small inefficiencies compounded into systemic breakdowns.

Make Research Resonate with Leadership

One of my key reflections from this project is the importance of positioning research as a lever that aligns with leadership priorities.

While the research surfaced strong systemic insights, I realized that senior management did not fully connect with the findings because the narrative didn't frame them in terms of their immediate concerns: operational risk, compliance efficiency, and financial ROI.