A major Australian university's scholarships function — managing $5M in annual funding — had collapsed into spreadsheets and inbox chaos after its only senior staff member left. Here's how it was rebuilt from the systems up, and why it still runs three years later.
The Situation
The scholarships and grants team administered around $5M in funding across more than a hundred programs. When the senior staff member left, the institutional knowledge left with them — and the one remaining admin had no documented process to fall back on.
The team had recently migrated off a legacy MS Access database onto a modern application platform, SurveyMonkey Apply. On paper, it was an upgrade. In practice, the platform had been half-implemented by IT and then abandoned mid-build. It was misconfigured to the point that students couldn't see the scholarships they were eligible for, reviewers didn't understand how to assess applications in it, and the admin team couldn't configure or operate it.
So everything fell back to spreadsheets. Manual handling everywhere. Deadlines routinely missed. No reporting, which meant leadership had no visibility into the health of a function distributing millions of dollars. The Destination Australia Scholarship in particular was at real risk.
The real problem
This wasn't a technology problem. The platform could do everything they needed. The failure was that nobody had bridged the gap between what the system could do and what the team could understand and use.
The Diagnosis
The first step wasn't building anything. It was analysing the entire end-to-end business process — from a student discovering a scholarship, through application, review, awarding, and reporting.
That analysis surfaced something most technical fixes miss: the problem wasn't only the system. There were genuine capability gaps in the team itself. No amount of reconfiguring the platform would stick if the people running it couldn't operate or maintain it. The fix had to address both layers at once.
The Transformation
With the diagnosis clear, the rebuild ran across people, systems, data, and process simultaneously.
Built the team to bridge the gaps
Hired new team members specifically to fill the capability gaps the analysis had exposed — then leveraged that new team to deliver the rebuild. The goal from day one was a team that could run this, not a dependency on any single person.
Rebuilt the system and the front-facing experience
Reconfigured the application platform properly — rebuilding the application logic so students could finally see and apply for what they qualified for. Rebuilt the front-facing websites for both students and reviewers, cleaned the data, standardised naming conventions, and updated every template.
Created control and visibility systems
Built centralised management in SharePoint: master lists to control the process, onboarding forms to standardise intake, Kanban boards for daily work tracking, and yearly calendars for the annual cycle. For the first time, the whole team could see the state of the work in one place.
Automated the manual handling
Developed automations that stripped out repetitive manual work, and redesigned the system processes around them. Built a live reporting dashboard that gave leadership visibility they had never had.
Retrained everyone
Redid training for the entire team, retrained the reviewers, supported students through the rebuilt experience, and collaborated with the Comms team to update the public-facing website.
Going Deeper
The biggest manual burden of all was the annual awarding process. To fix it properly required far higher API permissions than a scholarships role allowed — so the solution was to formally transfer into the IT department to get the access the build genuinely needed.
From there, the work became building live awarding tools that aggregated every scholarship and applicant into a single place, so awards could be made from one system instead of a sprawl of manual files.
Before — every year
After
The Scope
Very few engagements touch this many stakeholders in one piece of work. This one reached all of them.
| Audience | What changed for them |
|---|---|
| Students | A rebuilt front-facing site where they could finally see and apply for what they qualified for |
| Reviewers | A usable system and proper retraining to assess applications confidently |
| Admin team | New hires, rebuilt capability, retraining, and processes that actually stuck |
| Leadership | Live reporting dashboards — visibility into the function they never had |
| Comms | Cross-department collaboration on the public website |
| The data | Cleaned, standardised, templated, with consistent naming conventions |
The Outcome
After the rebuild, the work was recognised the way it should be: an invitation to step up to Senior Scholarships Officer — trusted to own the very function that had been rebuilt. The role was run, a replacement team was found and built, and then the handover happened by design.
This wasn't fixed and abandoned. It was fixed, trusted to be led, built into a team that could run it — and then deliberately made self-sufficient. Three years on, with an ongoing relationship and full system access, it's still running the same processes.
Key-person dependency is the most common failure mode in small business. The fix is systems and a team that don't rely on any single individual — including me. That's what an Efficiency Audit starts to map out.