Thread

Helping Melbourne Business School to be leaders in digital learning.

Thread is a peer community of senior business executives. It’s designed to foster continuous learning, helping members to absorb, collaborate and apply knowledge to be more successful at work. For the school, a key part of realising this goal was to better connect the learning that occurs in their highly regarded executive programs, to the reality of being at work.

What was the goal?

The school had several key aims: to improve the integration between formal and on-the-job learning, to add value to participants beyond the residential and other formal aspects, and to enable greater learning opportunities between peers and with facilitators.

What did we do?

Cogent teamed up with independent strategist Fiona Ingram on a short piece of research, and collaborated on this to form the base concept.

Following approval of this core idea, we spent five months in an iterative strategy, design & development cycle to produce the first release of Thread. Cogent engaged SouthSouthWest to create the stunning Thread brand-mark, which inspired our visual design of the product.

We’re happy to report that Thread came in on time, 30K under budget, and met all of the feature criteria needed for day one. This included to be rolled out to the first customer and to decommission an old system. Early feedback from users, the school, and from potential customers suggests that Thread will be a success in delivering on individual, organisation and social learning objectives, and play a big role in Melbourne Business School’s programs in future.

Where to?

We’re now in support mode and looking ahead to the next release, which will enable Thread to be used by any of Melbourne Business School’s customers for any of their programs. We also have a few other objectives to meet, including to better enable classroom-based learning, and to lift the value for organisations in driving their learning and development goals to their people. While the school gears up to sell Thread, we’d better get on with it!

View all projects

Figuring out how to give users better access to support.

Taking notes on Thread iPad app.

2013-02-07T00:48:28Z, Ben Birnbaum from Cogent said

Users are loving the new iPad app!

Refreshing the Learning guide!

2013-02-15T00:20:28Z, Simon Harris from Cogent said

Best feedback - "Having the iPad app has been fantastic. People don't even notice it anymore."

Review of Thread iPad app.

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Rebuilding the Customer Platform, ground up.

We are bright and good at what we do

That means we’ll ask lots of questions.

We don’t think about our skills as buzzwords like strategy, user experience, agile methods or Ruby on Rails development — we think about working as a team with your objective in mind.

We relish the challenge of creating something new, and to solve tough problems that haven’t been solved before. We know that designing something that is efficient to run matters too, that’s why we’re also happy to be your ongoing support team.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some great customers, like:

Melbourne Business School
The Alfred Hospital
Real Estate Group
Tesselaar
Rezeko
Sensis Yellow Pages
Swann Insurance
Lonely Planet
Jetstar