Review of Chronus Mentoring Platform

Chronus is a mentoring platform where mentors and mentees individual profiles can be created to be matched. It is a software as a Service platform hosted by Amazon Web Services, which guarantees the service to be available 24/7. It is a powerful solution that helps to engage, develop and retain potential users, automating the process of enrolling, matching, guiding and measuring the mentoring program. Administration time is reduced when the matching process is automated. One to one career mentor, diversity and inclusion mentoring circles are available. Using the matching algorithm, the software instantly recommends the best possible matches based on the customised criteria and match weighting. Users’ progress can be tracked, helping to measure program’s outcomes with tracking and reporting features. They can increase their productivity by using the mobile app available on both Android and iOS which let them access their program on the go and providing a better learning experience.

Chronus is highly customisable with a standard profile loaded into new instance, allowing creation and editing of questions to be used in matching, reporting and user management. It also allows for simple drag and drop ordering option of fields. It has form builder with capabilities for setting visibility rules for fields and responses to specific population within program, mandatory fields, various input options (checkbox, text field, radio button), section dividers for easy navigation, and create editable user profiles. Responsive website, it renders well on devices such as mobile phones and tablets. It uses Google “Materialize” which provides those capabilities. It has an embedded survey tool to create, share, track responses and then collect feedback from the mentoring process. A list of pre-built surveys are also available to choose from. An intelligent algorithm that recommends matched candidates by comparing profiles of mentors and mentees and raising or lowering the match score based on certain criteria with 0% match if criteria is not met for set matches and a score is assigned for weighted attributes. Different matching formats are provided such as Bulk matching, Admin matching and Self-matching.

The application provides “Views” which are mini reports where the result of the matching query is displayed, this view can have personalized names (e. g. In2Science All mentors and mentees). When creating the view, a range of criteria can be specified.

Chronus has a variety of communication tools; short informative system generated emails to notify administrators and users when certain system events are triggered, automatic messaging tools where emails can be scheduled to be delivered to various users and has send-message feature for ad-hoc real-time communication from admin-to-users or user-to-user. It is a scalable platform that allows to manage several tracks adding more participants in an existing track, grow a program across departments and locations and even run multiple tracks of mentoring. It has intuitive and user-friendly design and user interface, high level training is not required to navigate between the different options available and create a program to add mentors and mentees to match. It also provides different enrolment options such as invitations, applications and offers single sign-on integration with organisation active directory platform. The application generates reports in three levels – program (executive summaries showing entire program workflow) connection level (shows different mentoring connections e. g drafted or closed connections) and user level reporting providing admin with records of user activity and demographics.

Platform’s support is provided by placing tickets through the platform regarding a specific issue, the status of the ticket can be tracked. They can also help with common problems through online resources on the support site. Support is available 24/7. Ongoing technical support for program administrators is also available. There is also the option to contact directly an agent calling to the headquarters located in USA or the office in India. Initial Setup and configuration of the application based on the user needs is completed by the vendor, program administrators are also trained on piloting and launching the Chronus-based program, review of the program performance and offer best practices and guidance.