From a Year of Frustration to Live in Six Weeks: Lawrence Technological University’s Deployment Story

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

That was Linda Kucinski’s reaction when Civitas Learning told her Lawrence Technological University (LTU) could be fully deployed in about two months.

She wasn’t being dismissive. She was being honest — the kind of honest that comes from 20-plus years of working with student information systems, sitting through painful implementations, and watching promising software projects quietly fail. As a Business Analyst at LTU, Linda had seen what happens when a vendor overpromises. She’d just lived through a year of it.

So when Civitas Learning said two months, she heard it the way any experienced IT professional would: Nice goal. We’ll see.

They delivered anyway.

The Weight of a Failed Implementation

Before Civitas Learning, LTU had committed to a different student success platform. The implementation started with reasonable expectations and quickly became something else entirely.

“It was a lot more painful than we had expected,” Linda recalls. “It seemed like it was never getting better. We were always just trying to do the next step, with no real sense of what was ahead.”

A year in, LTU was nowhere near go-live. The internal resource burden far exceeded what had been projected. And critically, the product itself never became something the team felt confident they could own and maintain.

“I had like 14 steps to do one thing,” Linda says, “and I couldn’t really tell you how it got there in that process. It started to feel like a full-time job.”

That’s when LTU made the decision to pivot.

What LTU Was Actually Looking For

Walking into the evaluation of new solutions, Linda had a clear — if hard-won — set of criteria.

Responsiveness was non-negotiable. “You don’t have much time in an implementation,” she says. “If you can’t get answers quickly, everything stalls.”

Beyond that, she wanted a product that was essentially ready to go, requiring configuration rather than construction. And she needed something she could actually understand — not just implement once and hand off, but maintain, troubleshoot, and build on herself.” We wanted something clean and easy to use and clean and easy to maintain on a technical end,” she explains. “Those are two different things, and both matter.”

“There was a lot of documentation and clear steps — here’s what you need to do, here’s how you do it. We knew what we had to do. That’s not something I could say before.”

Six to Eight Weeks. For Real.

Civitas Learning was fully live at LTU in approximately six to eight weeks — accomplishing what a year with the previous vendor had not.

What made the difference wasn’t just speed. It was how the process felt from the inside.

“There was a lot of documentation and clear steps — here’s what you need to do, here’s how you do it,” Linda says. “We knew what we had to do. That’s not something I could say before.”

When questions came up, responses came back quickly — sometimes requiring multiple rounds of back-and-forth, but always moving forward. “We’d go back and forth sometimes a dozen times, but it always ended up getting done.” The team also came in with a structured process for who needed to be in which meeting and in what order, keeping sessions focused and productive.

“Sometimes they say an implementation will take 10% of your IT time and it ends up being 50 or 60%,” Linda notes. “Their expectations for us were spot on.”

The Part No One Talks About: What Happens After Go-Live

For Linda, one of the most telling signs of a good vendor isn’t how they behave during implementation — it’s what happens after.

“Usually once you go through implementation and sign off, you move over to a whole other kind of customer,” she explains. “The responsiveness slows down. You kind of feel like you’ve lost that special status. Like, we already got your money.“

With Civitas Learning, that shift never happened.

A year out from go-live, LTU was still getting the same level of engagement. When the team wanted to pull midterm grades from Canvas into Civitas Learning — not a standard workflow — Civitas Learning’s customer development team worked with them to find an interim solution while a longer-term integration was developed. “We still feel like we’re their new customers,” Linda says. “We still feel like we’re special.”

That continuity has had real operational value. LTU is currently transitioning from centralized advising to a college-based model — a significant structural change — and the stability of the Civitas Learning relationship has made that transition easier to manage.

Early Value, Growing Over Time

Within a couple of months of go-live, key advisors were already seeing insights they hadn’t had access to before — useful signals that helped steer their work and build confidence in the data.

For Linda’s part, the early win was quieter but equally meaningful: the system just worked. Semester transitions happened automatically. Student data rolled into place without manual intervention. “I don’t have to do anything to make that happen,” she says. “That’s a really big win for me.” LTU is now entering a second phase — leveraging more of Civitas Learning’s Student Impact Platform features for group-based notifications and college-specific workflows. Predictive analytics capabilities are on the horizon as more data accumulates. The foundation is in place.

“The Best Vendor I’ve Ever Worked With”

Linda has worked with a lot of vendors over a long career. She doesn’t say things like this casually.

“Civitas (Learning) has been the best vendor I’ve ever worked with,” she says. “They are the most responsive, and they’re extremely capable. If you need something done, it gets done and it’s right. I would recommend them 100%.”

She’s quick to add context: “It wasn’t just because our previous experience was bad. It very much surprised me when they said we could do it within two months. I really was like — I’ll believe it when I see it.”

She believed it.

“Civitas (Learning) has been the best vendor I’ve ever worked with. They are the most responsive, and they’re extremely capable. If you need something done, it gets done and it’s right. I would recommend them 100%.”

Why This Story Matters for IT Leaders

Fear of implementation is real, and it’s rational. IT teams have seen projects fail. They’ve absorbed the hidden costs — the overtime, the scope creep, the user frustration, the political fallout. When a new platform comes up in conversation, that history is in the room.

LTU’s experience doesn’t promise that every deployment will be painless. It does demonstrate that a fast, low-friction implementation is achievable — and that the right partnership makes the difference between a project that drains your team and one that builds their confidence.

For institutions where deployment risk is the blocker, that’s the story worth hearing.What LTU experienced reflects a broader shift in how institutions approach student success — not as disconnected tools, but as an operating model that connects insight to action. When deployment is fast and adoption is early, institutions can begin closing the gap between insight and action.

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Lawrence Technological University is a private university in Southfield, Michigan, offering programs across engineering, architecture, business, and the arts and sciences.