Jeffrey Janssen is the CTO of Avans and is responsible for all IT services at the university of applied sciences. He has held this position for more than ten years. Over the course of those ten years, he has seen a lot of changes: Avans has made tremendous strides. Together with Anna Noorda (General Manager) and Vicky Schnitzler (Mendix developer) from Alistar, he reflects on the collaboration with Alistar and the developments that IT and education are undergoing together.
“Stay with us and grow—that’s the message we both want to convey.”
Anna: Alistar believes that people can do more tomorrow than they can today. Avans feels exactly the same way. We encourage people to just go for it. You might stumble once in a while, but you’ll learn from it, and that will make you better tomorrow. Stay with us and grow—that’s the message we both want to convey.
Jeffrey: It’s our natural way of thinking, and we also use that mindset to justify certain decisions. We consider the development of our people to be incredibly important—for example, in the case of Vicky’s internal promotion.
Vicky: When a position opened up as Mendix developer, My current assignment as an ICTO Coach hadn’t yet been fully completed. We had a conversation, and I was asked how eager I was to take this step. And whether this step was necessary for my continued professional growth. It was. My department head didn’t think it was ideal, but I was still allowed to take that step. They didn’t want to hold me back in my development—that’s characteristic of this organization.
Anna: Sometimes you realize that people are really, really good at their roles. That’s incredibly valuable to an organization, which is why we can only allow someone to take that next step after thorough consultation. But organizations should never be dependent on a single supplier. That’s why one of our goals is to build up in-house expertise, so that a client can stand on its own two feet.
Vicky: At its core, it’s about leaving things in such a way that your replacement can pick up right where you left off. A department or a specific role shouldn’t be dependent on any one person—we at Alistar really consider that to be very important.
“Demonstrate, do it together, do it yourself. That’s our guiding principle.”
Jeffrey: Demonstrate, do it together, do it yourself. That’s our guiding principle. At first, we didn’t develop anything ourselves, even though Avans’s ambition is to be agile and resilient. That starts with the support services within our organization, and that led to the decision to start developing software ourselves. When we at Avans began working more with Mendix, we brought in Alistar to show us how it’s done. After that, we worked on it together for a while, and now we’re able to build Mendix components on our own. That’s a fantastic development and proof of a valuable partnership.
Anna: We connect through our passion for education. We understand the challenges of being an educator. To achieve your goals, you need a foundation—and that goes beyond knowledge and experience. It requires dedication from your people—people who understand that Avans wants to grow and who are more than happy to contribute to that. That’s what you’re working toward. For a successful partnership, you need to understand through and through why a client does what it does.
Jeffrey: That's it. That's also what defines Alistar: commitment. The desire to understand. There are very few companies that are as committed to an organization like ours.
“We want to get better every day and make sure Avans gets better.”
Vicky: What I see in myself and my Alistar colleagues is that we all want to make a difference. It’s not just about doing what you’re supposed to do and then heading home. We want to get better every day and make sure Avans gets better every day. That’s actually something Alistar looks for when hiring—we’re all people who go the extra mile. We don’t just do what’s asked of us; we improve processes and make our work more efficient.
Jeffrey: That’s really great to see. We also encourage people to take the initiative on their own. Of course, things don’t always go as planned, but that’s okay. It’s okay to stumble. You can only learn from those experiences—just as we’ve been learning and growing together for almost five years now.
Anna: And we’re all still learning every day. Alistar wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t partnered with Avans. Jeffrey saw the potential and took a chance on us. We’ve been given countless opportunities to discover who we are as a company, and many of our people have been given the freedom to excel at what they do.
