How McGraw-Hill adapts to market demands through technology

McGraw-Hill Education (MHE), one of the Big Three providers in education content, recognized years ago the significant opportunity presented by changing technology in the classroom. Educators were under pressure to provide individual, personalized learning to every student.

If MHE could deliver insightful, technology-based education products and services, they could demonstrate their commitment to providing customers with state-of-the-art, adaptive learning systems. In doing so, they would redefine themselves as a large corporation with the capacity to innovate in a changing market.

They knew partnering with a company experienced in developing technology solutions was key, and that’s how the long and collaborative relationship between MHE and our Fusion team began.

When our Fusion team first began working with MHE, their main challenge was the tremendous demands that producing innovations would place on the organization’s mission to deliver high-quality content and materials – especially since their primary expertise when we started working together was print-based, not digital. MHE looked to us for thought leadership and a strategic vision, and to leverage our application developers, scrum masters/project managers, quality assurance resources, application technical leaders, and technical product managers to help execute the vision. Different development teams were organized to deliver numerous large-scale educational products that continue to be used in classrooms today. For example, we led the architecture and business-case discussion for deploying application services in the cloud, which serves more than four million students.

As the success of the partnership continued and specific products were delivered, MHE expanded this practice across their digital platform group. Another benefit emerged serendipitously. When MHE originally partnered with Fusion in 2010, Fusion was a thought leader in the Agile space. As such, we introduced Agile development principles and the Scrum development framework to MHE’s team, who began to experience firsthand the difference of an Agile environment. Fusion’s Agile framework became widely adopted within MHE.