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How an on-site visit and a Technical Success Manager changed the way Norse works with Access
Paula Dean joined Norse's Digital Learning team not long after Access LMS Evo first went live there, relatively new to both the organisation and the platform. In the time since, she's made the system very much her own, and it's her Access team that she credits with helping her do it. Ask her what's made the biggest difference to that journey, and she doesn't point to a single feature. She points to the people.
Someone actually came to see her
Norse is a large, multi-entity organisation, and its LMS setup reflects that: bespoke roles, linked course structures, and a fair amount of complexity behind the scenes. Paula had a clear requirement that had been sitting unresolved for a long time, and it took a proper, hands-on visit to finally move it forward.
Rather than working the problem over email, a Customer Success Manager travelled to Norse's offices and spent the day going through the system with Paula in person: seeing the issues first-hand, and mapping out exactly what she needed in detail, area by area.
“He came down to see us, hands-on, going through all the issues we had, asking, ‘Where do we go from here, what’s doable, what isn’t?’ It was the first time someone had actually sat down with us like that, rather than it just being back and forth over email. It meant a lot.” - Paula Dean, Digital Learning Lead, Norse
That visit gave the project real momentum, giving Norse's requirements to Access's product and development teams in enough detail to start scoping what a bespoke Local Admin Role, giving individual joint ventures control of their own patch without full access to the wider system, could actually look like.
Then Lewis picked it up, and turned it into something real
Getting from that conversation to a working role fell to Norse's Technical Success Manager, Lewis. It wasn't a quick fix, and it wasn't guaranteed to be straightforward: he worked through it with Norse iteratively, testing, adjusting, and being upfront throughout about what could and couldn't be promised. What he ultimately delivered now lets joint ventures manage their own learners, events and documents directly, unblocking a migration that thousands of learners had been waiting on.
For Paula, seeing that follow-through, months of patient, careful work rather than a single big-bang fix, was as meaningful as the visit itself.
“I’d been battling for something for so long and people kept saying it wasn’t possible. Watching Lewis actually get us there, step by step, I actually cried. It was a genuine turning point.” - Paula Dean, Digital Learning Lead, Norse
What stands out to Paula isn't just that Lewis got it done. It's how he did it.
“The back end could be the most complicated it could ever be. As long as the front end for the end user is smooth and it’s a really good experience, that’s my biggest thing. He doesn’t use technical jargon that I can’t understand. He always looks at it from the end user’s perspective, not just the back end. Some people in a technical background don’t see it that way. He does.”
Honesty over false reassurance
The other trait Paula keeps coming back to is how Lewis handles the moments when something isn't guaranteed to work. Rather than promising an outcome and hoping for the best, he sets out the risk plainly, and keeps working the problem anyway.
“He’ll say, ‘I need to set your expectations, I don’t know if this is possible, but I’m working on it, trust me.’ He’s always upfront. I’d rather have full honesty, because some people hide that, and I appreciate that he doesn’t.” - Paula Dean, Digital Learning Lead, Norse
That approach extends to communication generally. Lewis sets clear expectations on response times, flags cover when he's away, and follows through even when things take longer than planned.
A relationship, not just a ticket queue
Paula's quick to point out that this isn't just a technically competent relationship, it's a genuinely easy one. When issues do come up, and with a system this complex, they do, there's enough trust built up that she can simply say what's wrong and get on with fixing it.
“I don’t have to beat around the bush with him. He’s always very calming, and before you know it, we’re talking about what we did on the weekend, and it’s, ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do.’”
It's a small thing on paper, but it's the difference between a support relationship that feels transactional and one that doesn't. For an organisation as complex as Norse, working through a genuinely bespoke platform build, that's not a nice-to-have. It's the reason the hard problems actually get solved.