Welcome

We are omido and our goal is to promote openness to methods and ideas for development and organisation in higher education

We help universities to improve how they work – and improve student success and satisfaction – by experimenting with new methods and practices for product development and service and organisation design.

We do this by drawing on the best contemporary techniques from lean, agile and digital product management, and new thinking from diverse industries and domains beyond the management mainstream.

Please browse our site for more about our philosophy, our approach and the learning from current partners and projects we are supporting. And if you’re interested to know more about how we can help you, please contact us.

Why omido?

There is widespread recognition among people involved in online course development and support that our current approaches are not fit for the challenges we face as an organisation. Teams tell us that our processes are slow, costly, inflexible and overly complicated. Our numbers for student satisfaction and staff motivation speak for themselves.

The OU’s content production system was built in an age of certainty, stability and market dominance. It is not suited for disruption, hostile market competition, and fast-changing student behaviours and expectations. This is not inevitable. Other ways are possible.

As developers and project/product managers we have seen firsthand the benefits of alternative approaches in a range of other organisations, including HEIs. We know, from our own experience and from published surveys, that agile and digital production methods afford these benefits and more:

increased productivity
reduced costs
happy people (customers and staff)
greater speed to market
improved product quality.

Read more about our ongoing research into the experiences of users of the OU module production system

How we work

We do not follow or seek to implement any one specific methodology. We do not believe that there is one ready-made method or process which will fit all our projects and products, and solve all our problems.

Instead, we help OU curriculum production teams to improve how they work by experimenting with multiple new practices and techniques. We are developing a structured approach to experimentation, learning from success and failure, and stabilising and scaling new production methods and techniques.

As we learn together from this experimentation, we seek to develop better ways of working for the whole OU community to share, to support our targets for student satisfaction, staff motivation and financial sustainability.