May 31, 2023 4:39 pm

A state university network (SUN) in the U.S. that manages many colleges was looking for a better way to track compliance with the Congressional Act called Perkins V.  Perkins V was signed into law in 2018 and it reauthorized and improved upon the Perkins IV act of 2006.  This act provided $1.3 billion toward career and technical education for youth and adults in order to enhance their career choices and better provide for themselves and their families.  Part of this funding included accountability and reporting requirements for managing various measures and their continuous improvement. (1)

SUN had a home grown system to manage reporting and compliance with the original Perkins IV act, but it had the following challenges:

• Perkins V created gaps in the current system as the requirements were significantly different. SUN had to decide whether they would make changes to their custom code or purchase a new platform.
• The home grown system was built to handle a certain set of requirements and was not nimble enough to handle process changes easily.
• SUN had the need for a system that could fill the requirements of other use cases down the road that would be significantly different than Perkins V tracking.  
• SUN initially required that a new platform would be on premise, but later they had to shift this to the cloud because of new requirements from the IT group based on recent policy changes.  

After a long search for a solution, SUN found our Intellimas software and quickly realized that it had the features to handle the Perkins reporting requirements.  We worked with SUN to go through a series of demos as they wanted to be sure that Intellimas worked as advertised.  Intellimas is flexible enough for our pre-sales team to quickly configure a solution to closely match the client requirements so that demos hit home with prospects.  Here are some of the Intellimas features that were selling points for SUN: 

• The data and reporting requirements necessitated that the solution include a form for reporting and a grid for raw data visualization.  Therefore the Intellimas capabilities of both a configured form view and grid view really checked a box for them.
• The ability to make quick changes was extremely important as it took many adjustments to get the form the way they needed it, because there are many components to it.
• The Perkins plans are qualitative analyses based on compiled metrics so it was great that the form view had the ability to display a grid as well.
• Intellimas can handle many other use cases besides the Perkins reporting requirements which made it a more valuable tool for SUN.
• Intellimas is available on the cloud or on premise
• Intellimas has a built-in reporting tool.  When the project shifted to the cloud, this reporting tool became invaluable as hard copy reports were a key to the process.  

Intellimas was a success at SUN, not only due to the flexibility and features of Intellimas, but also because of a project team that collaborated well together. This led to another project related to Perkins budgets and may lead to other projects down the road.

(1) Perkins Collaborative Resource Network (https://cte.ed.gov/accountability/about-accountability)
Congress made accountability for results a central focus of Perkins V, setting out new performance requirements for States and local programs. These requirements were established to assess the effectiveness of the State in achieving statewide progress in career and technical education and to optimize the return on investment of Federal funds in career and technical education.