Hardcastle & Associates and XOLAS announce their strategic partnership to support business schools to achieve their strategic ambitions and respond to future challenges through enhanced engagement, impact and relevance.

Hardcastle & Associates and XOLAS GmbH have signed a strategic memorandum of understanding enhancing their consultancy offer to clients from their complementary service portfolios. The agreement brings together two organisations seeking collaboration around impact and engagement within Higher Education, and with business schools in particular.

“We are excited about this next step in the development of our ethos to share expertise, experience and networks.” said Sarah Hardcastle, Founder of Hardcastle & Associates. “By formalizing a collaboration with our friends at XOLAS, we can offer greater depth and breadth of knowledge to meet the varied needs of our clients.”

“Becoming more effective in generating business and social impact is one of the most important challenges facing universities and especially business schools today”, said Ulrich Hommel, Managing Director of XOLAS. “The collaboration with Hardcastle & Associates will enable us to realize our joint ambitions of making achievements in this area more tangible and measurable. Hardcastle & Associates will play a key role in our strategic network by helping us to expand our client base and serve them better with a more comprehensive service portfolio.”

About Hardcastle & Associates

Since 2018, Hardcastle & Associates have provided specialist professional services support, insight and advice, sharing experience through consultancy and reports to enable their clients to connect and achieve deeper stakeholder engagement. From marketing and reputation building, recruitment and admissions to careers, alumni and corporate relations, they work with clients to deliver effective solutions. They are authors of a series of Sharing the Experience reports and articles including: Business School Advisory Boards – Maximising the Opportunity and The MBA and the Value of Practitioner Engagement.

About XOLAS GmbH

XOLAS is a strategy consultancy advising business schools and universities on achieving their development goals in three broad areas:

  • Strategy and Quality Enhancement: XOLAS enables clients to map development aspirations into strategic plans and facilitates the effective execution of these plans. XOLAS helps to communicate outcomes as quality improvement achievements to external stakeholders, including accreditors and ranking providers.
  • Portfolio and Technology: XOLAS assists clients in the evaluation and transformation of (degree and non-degree) program portfolios and provide the entrepreneurial capacity to establish new programs that are aligned with institutional aspirations. It helps clients to embed modern technologies into educational offerings to augment delivery and to enhance the eLearning capabilities of faculty and staff
  • Risk Management: XOLAS help clients to implement risk management as a core decision support function that fosters the development of an institutional risk culture and clarifies risk appetite on a strategic and operational level. Its software solution allows for the institution-wide tracking of risk management activities and standardized reporting to satisfy compliance requirements.

Media Contacts:

Sarah Hardcastle, Founder, Hardcastle & Associates
sarah@hardcastleassociates.com
+44 (0)330 133 1053
https://www.hardcastleassociates.com/

Ulrich Hommel, Managing Director, XOLAS
ulrich.hommel@xol.as
+49 (0)156 7854 2990
https://www.xol.as/