More than one million subscribers and more than two million subscriptions. The numbers of the first edition of 2022 of the Unified Selection System (Sisu) show the high volume of hits that the portal receives during the application period, every year. And the fact that, even with the peak of 91 thousand simultaneous accesses, the site did not face any moment of instability, with 100% availability, reinforces the results of the partnership signed between the National Education and Research Network (RNP) and the Ministry of Education (MEC) with the aim of improving user experience in higher education access systems. In 2020, RNP migrated Sisu to a cloud environment and, since then, the system has high computing capacity, an elastic and scalable infrastructure, and benefits such as agility, security and stability. 

> Remember the first editions in the years 2020 and 2021!

For the undersecretary of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at MEC, André Castro, in addition to the cutting-edge technology applied to the solution, having a strategic partner like RNP is the key to positive results. “In addition to the possibilities that the cloud offers us, the technical expertise of RNP's highly specialized professionals allows us to explore these features. During this edition of Sisu, internally, we experienced technical challenges and the team, with a very agile capacity to act, adopted measures to maintain the quality level of the operation, without any damage to the solution. The result that this worked is the users' perception that there was no difficulty in accessing. On the contrary, the experience was even better, with reports of high performance”, defends André.
 

Inside the operating strategy

"For two years, RNP has been carrying out, together with MEC, the management and technical operation of SiSU, having started with the journey to the cloud, aiming at the best experience for the end user in relation to availability, application response time, among other technical requirements and, at the same time, adjusting the entire process to enable the necessary quality with the greatest economy of resources”, recalled the director of Services and Solutions at RNP, Antônio Carlos F. Nunes. “In 2022, the first edition carried out showed an even greater maturity in all the processes carried out by the management and technical teams involved, with a perfect performance, leaving the environment 100% available to receive the more than one million subscribers and two million subscriptions, aiming at admission to a public higher education institution", he evaluates.

An idea endorsed by RNP’s Deputy Director of Specialized Digital Services, Marcello de Jesus, who adds: “We exercised cycles of lessons learned internally over the last two editions, which gave us a broader view of the initiative and allowed us to understand with more accuracy not only issues related to technology, but also to processes, management and people. In this direction, I can say that today we have a high performance team focused on delivering the best user experience”.

RNP's deputy director of Solutions, Cláudio Silva, goes back even further. He highlights that RNP has been developing specialized consulting and advanced operation of strategic initiatives for the Education, Science, Technology and Innovation Ecosystem (ETCI) since 2009. About the performance in the Ministry of Education systems, he opines: “In Sisu, the benefits and improvements of the platform are noticeable in terms of performance, security and availability. Our challenge is always to improve the quality of service for the MEC and, for that, we deliver the Single Access portal, as a way to integrate and facilitate the student's journey to enter higher education”.
 

Further integration

Well, MEC's other bet to simplify the navigation of candidates vying for a place in higher education based on the score obtained in the National High School Exam (Enem) is the Single Access Portal, which brings together in a digital environment the portals of the Sisu, the University for All Program (Prouni) and the Student Financing Fund (Fies).

By filling in their registration data only once, users have their information integrated and, through a single platform, they are able to enroll in the three federal programs. “Our expectation was to generate a unified, simplified experience with better performance for students, reducing the cost of construction, operation and maintenance of these applications”, explains André Castro, undersecretary for ICT at MEC.

For this, the MEC relied on RNP, which is also responsible for the technological solution. “To carry out this delivery of value from the Single Portal to the MEC at the appropriate time, RNP used its work methodology, which consists of five steps: discover, co-create, raise, build and sustain. With this interactive cycle throughout the work and with specialties in agile project management and technological architecture, we arrived at the result that MEC has been waiting for. That is, to deliver a product with the end user's vision: the student”, explains the assistant director of Specialized Digital Services at RNP, Marcello de Jesus. 

User perception was so important in this process that, in the co-creation stage, participants from previous editions of Sisu, Prouni and Fies were interviewed and were able to report on their browsing experiences in the portals, pointing out possible improvements.

The history of this partnership for the technological improvement of this important mechanism of access to higher education has yet to gain new chapters. Also this year, participants in the Sisu, Prouni and Fies selection processes in the second semester should come across new features. Keep an eye out!