Project Info:
Achieva was a brick and mortar company that specialized in counseling high school students with the college admission process, placing many students at ivy League schools around the country. Their vision was to take the entire process online, allowing a student to take all of their courses through the Web in an interactive e-learning environment. This was a multi-phase Dotcom project involving over 25 internal staff, many software and service vendors and a total budget of near 2 million dollars over 2 phases. The first phase launch was an extensive effort, involving many parts: A large sales front web site that detailed the programs to perspective parents and students and displayed an 8 minute flash demo (a $300,000 project in itself) and full e-commerce and credit card capabilities to allow for the purchasing of the online program. The online program itself was extensive, with 7 different course modules, online file creation and management for the students and flash educational movies with voice over for each module. The project launched successfully and was introduced to the marketplace. Achieva has since merged with its competitor, Kaplan Inc.
Contribution Detail:
My role on Achieva was Lead Strategy Consultant and Account Director. I was introduced to the client pre-sales as project lead and led the client through initial scoping cycles to define the budget, scope and scale of the project. I then wrote the contract for the first phase, presented it to the client and was successful in winning the project. The project began with multiple JAD sessions and market gap analysis to define vision and scope. I led these sessions and played the lead role in helping the client decide how to take their program online in an e-learning environment and helped shape the site features and functionality. My role as Account Director was then to be the main client contact, oversee the development team, assist the Project Manager with issue resolution and negotiate change orders as needed. I also played a lead role in researching and facilitating the necessary software, hardware and service vendor agreements.
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