About

University College London’s (UCL’s) strategic focus is to create the best possible experience for their students and to allow their researchers to work at pace. As one of the leading universities in the UK, UCL wanted to ensure that they continued to be pioneers in their field and could develop a five-year digital transformation programme to update their legacy tech.

UCL came to La Fosse as they needed to create a flexible talent pipeline with the new skills required to drive innovation and change, whilst also working with the existing teams to manage their legacy tech.

Requirement

We worked with UCL to change the culture of how technology is developed, pivoting away from an isolated group of individuals delivering IT projects and instead building multi-disciplinary teams of tech generalists with deeper expertise in specific disciplines, who would be able to take responsibility for a tech product or feature at all stages.

La Fosse Academy cohorts can be flexible because we train them with specific business goals and objectives in mind. We onboarded Associates into a new ‘Code Force Alpha’ team at UCL, with a view to providing the Director of Engineering with a highly-skilled tech leadership team at the end of the two-year placement.

Solution and results

Thanks to their expert training at La Fosse Academy, ‘Code Force Alpha’ brought a fresh perspective to the UCL tech team. Their flexible mindsets helped them stay open to understanding the existing knowledge and skills required to manage their legacy tech, while also introducing their own cutting-edge tech know-how.

One year into their placement, the team has already helped to implement a new CRM that has automated the process of responding to over 100,000 student admission queries, as well as building a catalogue of reusable APIs, reducing the time it takes to access the right data.

Thanks to the ongoing support from the Academy’s Engagement Managers and UCL’s line managers, these Associates are on track to form a highly-skilled tech leadership team by the end of their two-year placement.

Testimonial

“Globally, the demand for technology talent is enormous, and supply limited. Organisations can barely keep up, so we are always competing to secure the skilled and talented people we need.

La Fosse’s unique and creative approach helped us deliver the projects we needed over and above our expectations.”

Sophie Harrison, Director of Product Delivery at UCL