It’s often in the process, not always in the tool

Machiel Groeneveld and Mary Beijleveld  just finished a project at an educational institution. Schools often work in close cooperation with other schools and are usually part of a larger partnership with various schools in there municipality. Part of the cooperation and collaboration is regarding allocation of types of education and schools. This school for predominantly HAVO / VWO education (ca. 1500 students) and a smaller part consisting of VMBO vocational education (ca. 500) has more than 200 people working there. Personnel consists of teachers, deans, staff, facilities, and a few people minding all IT systems.

Approach was asked to advice the school on how to make best use of ICT resources for creating schedules for students and teachers and the formation of the teachers workforce.

In summary, the experienced problems were  late completion of grids/schedules and therefore late insight on how many and for which subjects to hire teachers. This also depends on prognosis  on how many new students registered, how many student proceed to next school year and school type and has great consequences on school budget . Our first view on the case was that content of programs and applications were not synchronized, information wasn’t up to date and necessary information not congruent.

In order to give a practical and good advice we first had to identify the most crucial problems regarding process, what IT resources where available, in what manner IT resources were used, and what priority solving a problem has to the school stakeholders. To find out what bothers most, takes the most time, how many and which stakeholders are involved, we held interviews with all stakeholders.

Machiel has in-depth knowledge and experience on how IT systems work and knowledge on some pretty important lean practices. Mary is expert in BPM methods &  techniques and has experience in solving organizational issues. Working together enabled us to take a multidisciplinary view at the problem and to assemble the best and most valuable advice for this customer.

In the interviews we walked, step by step, thru the whole end-to-end process to see where bottlenecks occur, where transfers to other roles were necessary (or not) and which IT resources were used to support stakeholders and process. We didn’t use a sophisticated tool, just rounded A5 papers and pencils or whiteboard and markers to make process visible.

In short, problems were caused by low assessable homemade systems (access dbase, spreadsheets), synchronization of information between homemade systems & commercial products and between Do-It-Yourself systems themselves. Furthermore, process was not ranged optimally and errors easily occurred. Limited accessibility to the content of programs and applications (for example the scheduling makers) and various officials at different times and places making changes in program content.

For quick wins Approach, amongst others,  advised on making clear decisions on moments and responsibilities within the end-to-end process, communication and governance on decisions  & appointments  and improvement on the use of (DIY) systems by supplying a ‘howto’.  For long term alleviation, Approach suggested sensitive communication to understand who needs what information in which step, where an inaccuracy cascades in multiple errors further on in process and disciplined actions for controllability and management.  And we recommend on further research on functionality, integration capabilities and interconnectedness of their existing or future IT resources.

When we presented our report, stakeholders said they didn’t expect to get such advice. They expected something like: ‘get rid of your IT resources, DIY systems and buy ‘this’ one’.  At the end of the presentation session we helped stakeholders to realize about their own responsibilities in the process and to decide about the next approach. The school leaders expressed they were very pleased.