Anna Bailey is the Practice Leader for akaCRM's Education Services Practice and serves as an Engagement Manager for key akaCRM clients. 

Anna comes from a family of educators and completed a degree in teaching. Though she never became a teacher, she followed her interests into the field of higher education. Working as support staff in a student success role and coaching student employees, Anna focused her passion for education as transformation and began to understand how crucial process improvements, particularly leveraging technology could improve the work environment and provide better student experience. 

Through staff retirements and reorganization, Anna worked as a transfer advisor and then an assistant director (operations), she also became a member of a cross divisional team of Lean practitioners who worked on cross-departmental and cross-divisional projects. The Lean Team worked through process improvements across the university and Anna developed as a facilitator and became passionate about bringing people together and creating space where transformation begins. 

When Salesforce was identified as a student success strategic project, Anna jumped in as the student success operations manager and acted as primary business analyst and liaison during this inaugural project. 

Witnessing the transformation in collaboration and process improvement was enough to get Anna hooked. She followed Salesforce into a newly created role in IT to support the project and to bring the tool into more areas of the institution. The next three years were action packed adventures with collaboratively developing Salesforce platform tools for peer support, the career center, and the advancement development team. Anna's favorite part of this work was to be able to help provide solutions to improve efficiencies, see new projects come together, and most importantly, to support people doing really great work. 

Working with teams looking for process improvement is Anna's joy, with Salesforce as her tool of preference, she looks forward to partnering to build new paths into the future.