ViKiwi

Unlimited project management expertise for less than $1000 per month

There is general consensus that poor project management is the main reason why many reform projects fail. But without systemic reform, districts cannot achieve breakthrough results for all students in all schools.  ViKiwi’s president, Gee Kin Chou announced a new service that makes project management expertise available and affordable to every school district across the US.  By addressing the main cause of project failure, ViKiwi can guarantee that strategic projects that are critical to systemic reform will have a greater chance of success.

Through schoolPME, Vikiwi provides school district project leaders the guidance and the tool to greatly improve the outcomes of their projects intended to achieve systemic reform, to make an immediate and sustained impact regardless of their project management experience, for a fraction of the cost of outside consultants.  For less than $1000 per month, a project leader has unlimited voice and text access to a project management expert over the Internet, and use simple list management technology to organize the project, build and maintain a project plan, identify and resolve issues, control the risks, and strengthen stakeholder collaboration to keep the project moving in the right direction.

Chou said: “Many school districts know systemic reform depends on the success of their strategic projects, and they know project success depends on competent project management, but they do not have in-house project management expertise and they feel they cannot afford outside consultants.  So they just hope and pray.  Sometimes they are lucky, but often they are disappointed.”

Chou continued: “With schoolPME districts no longer have to make the hard budgetary choice.  They can get the project management expertise to guarantee better results, for less than the cost of a consultant for one day.” 

Interim CTO uses Schoolmeasures to bring order to chaos

When the CTO abruptly left this urban Southern Californian district, she left behind staff overwhelmed by more than 40 projects.  Amidst the chaos, the Superintendent was worried that several critical projects, including the implementation of a new student information system, would miss their goals.  Acting as Interim CTO, ViKiwi listed all the projects in Schoolmeasures, and documented the status of each project.  Using the Schoolmeasures status report as the framework for discussion, the Interim CTO led the district's leadership to quickly agree on priorities, enabling resources to be more effectively deployed.  At the weekly Leadership Team meetings, the Interim CTO used the Schoolmeasures status report to descibe progress on all projects, and heighten awareness of critical issues that needed to be resolved.  By the end of his 4 month tenure, the Interim CTO had successfully launched the new student information system, dramatically improved customer service, and had ensured that all schools would have operating clocks, bells and PA systems by the beginning of the school year. 

Schoolmeasures made the transition to the incoming CTO very easy:  he could log on to Schoolmeasures and see the owner, status, priority, history and next steps for every project. 

Interim CTO uses Schoolmeasures to get SIS implementation back on track

When the CTO of this large district in southern California signed the contract during the summer of 2008to replace its Schoolmax Student Information System with Aeries, she had sought out ViKiwi to provide the project management;  she was fully aware that poor project management was the main reason for the failure of many technology projects and she wanted to ensure a successful implementation.  However, she was unable to find sufficient budget to fund outside help, and she found herself struggling to handle her regular responsibilities and keep the project moving in the right direction.  As a result, when the CTO abruptly left the district and a ViKiwi consultant arrived to act as Interim CTO in April 2009, the district faced the real possibility that Aeries would not be ready for the 2009-10 year.  

With the help of Schoolmeasures to organize and prioritize work, the Interim CTO was able to quickly build a project plan, document the issues, and assign tasks.  Each member of the project team, including the vendor, was able to use Schoolmeasures to view the project plan, see his/her assignments, and report when tasks were completed.  Even the Superintendent could log in at any time to view status.  By using the collaborative power of Schoolmeasures to align everyone's efforts in the same direction, the Interim CTO was able to lead the project team to make up lost ground and successfully launch Aeries in time for the new academic year, even while managing his other responsibilities.     

Dramatic service improvements achieved without increasing resources

Soon after he had assumed the Interim CTO position of this Southern Californian district, the ViKiwi consultant was receiving a continual stream of emails and phone calls from disgruntled teachers and principals describing their terrible experiences dealing with the Technology Services Department. Whenever he mentioned the negative feedback to his staff, he was told about the lack of resources and how the schools made unreasonable demands. 

The Interim CTO realized adding staff in a tight budget environment was unrealistic, but in any case, he also was not satisfied that lack of resources was the issue.  To get to the root causes of problems, he gathered all available quantitative and qualitative data, and shared those data with the entire staff. He created a collaborative, safe environment that encouraged every staff member to share redesign ideas and work as a team.  This was quite novel to the staff who were used to a top down, command and control management environment. 

Without increasing staff, and without implementing any new technology, the Interim CTO led the department to reduce the backlog of open tickets from 340 to 157 in two months.   At subsequent district meetings, principals expressed the feeling that a chronic source of frustration had finally turned the corner.

Getting started using ProjectDiscipline™

1. Set up the master account (you will be the holder of the master account):
   1. Go to www.projectdiscipline.net and click on "Sign up".
   2. Fill out all the fields and click "Submit". 
   3. Check your email for a message from ProjectDiscipline.  Click on the link to activate the master account. 
2. Set up the first project and its categories (you will be the Project owner for all the projects that you create):
   1. Click on "Create new project".
   2. Type in the name of the first project and click ü. 
   3. Click on "Create category" in the left-hand margin.  Type in the name of the first category and click ü.  Repeat this process for all the categories for this project.
   4. You have now set up the first project and its categories. You can delete or rename the project and/or its categories at any time.
3. Enable other members of the project team to access ProjectDiscipline:
   1. From the "Project list" ("Home" page), click on the project you have just created.
   2. Roll your cursor over the "Project" tab at the top of the page, and click on "Share".
   3. Click the button "Invite to project", type in the team member's email, customize the message or leave as the default, and click ü.
   4. Click the "x" in the top right hand corner to close the window.
   5. Each team member will receive an email from ProjectDiscipline inviting her/him to join the project.  S/he needs to follow the instructions to sign up.  Once s/he has signed up, you will see her/his display name in the list of "Project collaborators" the next time you access the project or refresh your browser.

   Helpful shortcut: After an invited colleague appears on the list of "Project collaborators" for one project, add her/him to you "Friend list" (Here's how).  Now, it is much easier to add her/him to any other project (Here's how).
   

4. Everyone is good to go once they have signed up.  As the holder of the master account, you can change or add projects, categories or collaborators at any time.  You can get more help at ProjectDiscipline User Support.

Making cuts in K-12 budgets less painful for students

Accountability in education is about taking actions to improve student performance and using data to evaluate outcomes and make decisions.  Every adult in the district is expected to contribute.  But determining how non-instructional activities can impact student achievement often poses a challenge. Gee Kin Chou, the president of ViKiwi, has suggested that a simple and tangible way for adults responsible for non-instructional activities to contribute is increasing the efficiency of their own work to free up funds for the classroom, and delivering a level of customer service that allows teachers and administrators to focus on student achievement.  He explains that in general, 20-40% of a district's budget is spent on activities other than instruction.  "Every dollar saved can be shifted to the classroom to make budget cuts less painful for students." And "issues like...inefficient bureaucracies distract urban school superintendents from focusing on student achievement."¹

Chou continues:  "While there is no magic target, reducing the percentage of the district budget spent on non-instructional activities while improving service quality should be a strategic goal of every district.  But prevailing processes and systems often make it difficult to achieve this goal.  Oral communications are often misunderstood, cannot be verified, and are easily ignored.  And email has hit its limits:  messages disappear from the screen whether the work has been completed or not, users have to keep sending more emails to find out what's going on, and there is no clear record of what's been done." 

SchoolMeasures™ , ViKiwi's free list management technology, can help address these specific issues.  SchoolMeasures drives follow-through and increases accountability because everything is written down and visible to stakeholders.  Tasks and responsibilities are clear.  Everyone knows what was requested, what has been done,and who is responsible for the next step.  Performance management data are automatically generated so managers and staff always have good data to make smart decisions.  And the collaborative capabilities of SchoolMeasures facilitate discussions and teamwork across organizational boundaries.

Chou suggests, particularly with constant budget pressures, it is imperative that districts implement accountability initiatives that combine process improvements, technology and cultural shifts to reduce the percentage of the district budget spent on non-instructional activities while improving service quality, and increase funds available to help raise student achievement.   

¹ http://broadresidency.org/become_a_resident/selection_criteria.html

ViKiwi helps district move forward on technology to help its teachers use data to drive instruction

The newly appointed superintendent for an urban California district wanted classroom instruction to be more data driven. However, he found that the district’s student information system and the student data analysis tool could not do what he felt was needed.

ViKiwi were engaged to help the district plan out a strategy to upgrade its data management systems.

They first provided the district’s technology committee an industry overview, explaining the functions and costs of the various components of a comprehensive data management infrastructure (for example: what is an “instructional management system”?) and suggested the priorities for a phased implementation plan. Having reached consensus that the top priority was to replace the student information system, ViKiwi then guided the RFP process, and led the district to evaluate responses and select the winning vendor.

Making grants for technology in K-12 education more effective

The impact of technology on student performance often has been disappointing, despite significant funding from both private and public sources.  In many cases, the software and the hardware seem to have performed as designed, but the outcomes have not met expectations. What do you have to do to make the investments in these systems pay off? 

Click here to download paper

END

ViKiwi fills technology leadership vacuum for a large California urban district

A large district in California suddenly found itself without an Executive Officer (ExO) of Technology.  It had started a nationwide search, but realized it could be months before the position would be filled. 

As it has done in several districts, ViKiwi provided a seasoned executive to serve as the interim ExO while the district proceeded to search for a permanent replacement.

The interim ExO moved quickly to bring the “fire drills” under control and then directed his attention to longer-term strategic issues including strengthening the server and network infrastructure to improve performance and reliability, determining upgrades to major data systems, redesigning business processes to improve service and decrease costs, and bringing the contractor-employee ratio down to a sustainable level by aggressively filling key vacancies.   

As the assignment stretched beyond the initial 3 months and eventually to 7 months, the interim ExO took responsibility for developing the following year’s budget, and integrating the functions of the project management office, and full responsibility for several major technology projects, into the Technology Services department.

In addition to a technology strategic plan, the interim ExO helped transition to the permanent executive by passing on a carefully maintained list of projects, issues, risks and fire drills with next steps, due dates, and responsibilities.      

Some of ViKiwi's clients

• Brockton Public Schools (MA)
• California Dept of Education (CA)
• Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (TN)
• Cleveland Municipal School District (OH)
• Cumberland County Schools (NC)
• East Baton Rouge Parish School System (LA)
• Gilroy Unified School District (CA)
• Jackson Public Schools (MS)
• New Haven Public Schools (CT)
• New York Law School (NY)
• Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President (DC)
• Oakland Unified School District (CA)
• Pasadena Unified School District (CA)
• Paterson Public Schools (NJ)
• Pomona Unified School District (CA)
• Stupski Foundation (CA)
• US Department of Treasury (DC)
• West Contra Costa Unified School District (CA)

ViKiwi helps district cleanse student attendance data, and keep the data clean

Poor data quality is a chronic problem for many school districts. But quite often, despite the drag on teaching and learning, productivity, and revenues, the issue is ignored until the annual crisis when data needs to be scrubbed and submitted to the state.  But sadly, once the crisis is over, everyone tends to fall back into old habits until the same time next year.    

ViKiwi led this California district to cleanse student attendance data, ostensibly to meet state reporting requirements, but also to provide better early warning signs of individual students at risk, and to provide more reliable aggregate data for the CFO to forecast ADA-based revenues.  ViKiwi helped identify the most pertinent data to track, established systems and processes to generate and gather the data, designed simple scorecards to highlight issues and trends, and coached district personnel to understand, interpret and act on the data. 

As an ongoing effort to maintain data integrity, ViKiwi led the redesign of the processes to take attendance, including expediting the implementation of web-based technologies to enable teachers to input attendance directly from their classrooms, and established clear responsibilities for accurate data input.      

ViKiwi helps educational foundation determine the impact of its work

A foundation had been working with K-12 education for several years and wanted to find out whether what it was doing was working.  Although it could find the results of the annual tests on the Department of Education websites for each state, it could not deduce the answers to this question from the way the data were presented. 

ViKiwi found student performance and student demographic data from public sources, sometimes going to several sources for a single state, and pieced together multi-year histories that extended before and (in some cases) after the foundation’s interventions.  To highlight not only whether the targeted districts and subgroups were improving but also whether they were catching up with the rest of the pack, they developed reports that graphed the trends in gap closure as well as performance.   The foundation could quickly see the impact of its programs from the executive summaries, and could study the story behind the results by going into the body of each report. 

ViKiwi designs CDE collaboration portal

Hey all,

ViKiwi is getting involved in design of the State of California website used for delivering standards to educators. Basically, we're helping design a system to allow educators to find and contribute content that is aligned to California educational standards. This was just made public as part of Jack O'Connell's state of the union speech today.

Click here to read the official CDE description of the Brokers of Expertise project; here is an excerpt:

BOE will be a knowledge management system to gather all available educational research that meets high standards, expertly cull the data for meaningful trends, and develop workable strategies specific to implementing that research into California’s extraordinarily diverse schools. BOE will provide the opportunity for thousands of outstanding educators from San Diego to Siskiyou to share their expertise and learn of the latest innovations from their colleagues throughout the state as well as our world-class research community. No longer will we be limited by geography as we build a bridge to our islands of excellence. BOE will provide the opportunity to combine, in a potentially revolutionary way, the expertise and innovations of California’s technology community with our educational community as we prepare California’s next generation of citizens.

The system shown will not be available in the near term but the general direction is a good one, towards collaborative online communities focused on educational needs.

--Eric

Information Technology Management

ViKiwi brings a structured approach to IT management for your IT projects. We use Agile software development techniques and technology best practices to produce a high quality solution.

Examples of IT management activities in a project based on the Unified process:

Project charter which includes a vision document
Initial use case model / business requirements
Business case with success criteria and financial forecasts
Risk assessment
Project plan showing phases and iterations
System architecture documentation

Information Design and Information Architecture

ViKiwi has extensive experience designing user-centered software to maximize usability. Whether the audience are customer service representatives, attorneys, or educators, we can establish a design that is tuned to the needs of the audience. 

ViKiwi has knowledge of best practices in information design and can bring the right resources to a project to assure success.

   Information Architecture
   Wireframes
   Website Maps
   Visual Design
   Personas
   Software Human Factors Expertise
   Usability Testing
   

Vendor selection & management

Selecting a vendor for a particular project is complicated because it requires a disciplined process to ensure due diligence is followed. Far too often a single product demonstration creates excitement and teams rush to purchase the one product without a structured approach. This creates risk and opportunity costs unnecessarily.

ViKiwi can help you to develop requirements criteria and decision matrices that fit the situation. ViKiwi can also help you to manage the selection and deployment of small and large systems.

Needs definition

Technical methodologies often neglect the business processes that are upstream from a project and this can leave a gap between the written user requirements and the actual needs they have. ViKiwi can help develop higher quality definitions of business needs and requirements that improve the success rate for resulting projects.

Areas of experience include:

Situation and Needs Analysis
Requirements definition
Developing business cases and business plans
User centered design
Facilitate discussions between IT and business users

Strategic Planning

ViKiwi can assist in developing an innovative strategic approach to specific business and technology problems.

For example, ViKiwi can help determine how to move business functions from the back office to the customer website.

ViKiwi can help with developing strategies and strategic planning. This includes defining a strategic planning approach or framework that is compatible with your situation, and then working through that approach with participating team members.

Business Process Improvement

ViKiwi has substantial experience leading efforts to improve and upgrade business processes. ViKiwi can work with you to develop an understanding of your current state and future state and establish a path to that new future that brings business and technology improvements to life.

Areas of experience include:

Web-based self-service applications
Opening new accounts
Electronic signatures
Inbound paper and document management

Using Ruby on Rails in Peer-to-Patent

As part of the NYLS Peer to Patent project , I took an extensive look at a variety of technologies that could be used to support a communicate based peer review of patent applications.

One segment that we looked at carefully was academic or scientific peer review technology. Peer review is nothing new in the academic world and so why not try to take advantage of something out there?  One of the best examples of this technology is the Topaz framework that is under development by the Public Library of Science (PLoS).  They've done a great job pulling together a java framework that allows markup of content in the scientific community. Topaz has some vert intriguing features including the ability to markup XML documents. We also looked at a variety of content management systems (CMS); but nothing fit quite right. Finally, we looked at PERL and PHP based alternatives. In the end, we wound up selecting Ruby on Rails. There are a few key reasons why this was the platform of choice in this instance.

First, we wanted a lightweight framework. The java-based alternatives available were either heavy weight (in the case of Mulgara) or not a good fit for the variety of Web 2.0 features that we were looking for. There was no web2 toolkit per se that had what we needed.

Second, while java has a huge variety of components and stacks, there isnt a dominant framework for handling the type of application we would be looking for. What this meant is that developers would have to spend a lot of time coming up to speed on the specific java libraries that were chosen as the starting point for the system.

Third, we wanted a framework that could be used for building other, similar applications.

So what are some of the lessons learned related to using Ruby on Rails? 

• Lesson 1: Easy to learn. Rails isn't much easier to learn than Java or any other language. It requires skilled developers and roughly the same skillset as java development. The place where you might pickup speed is when Rails has the components or code samples that you need more readily available than other frameworks.
• Lesson 2: Performance. Rails out of the box performance ain't so hot. It requires a lot of funky work to develop page caching schemes to make up for the performance of the rails stack. Once you get the caching scheme set, then you are in business. Rails can handle what we needed but it requires some tweaking to get to that point. 
• Lesson 3: The Rails framework is powerful. Basically, you can get a lot done with Rails. The flexibility of the framework has helped us keep a high level of control over the user experience for the system.

We're still motoring along using Rails and so far the results are good. The system works, it can handle the traffic as far as we need it today, and we are starting to look at how the system can be extended

In case you're wondering about Peer-to-Patent, you can find more about it here. The project enables the public to submit prior art and commentary relevant to the claims of pending patent applications in Computer Architecture, Software, and Information Security (TC2100). This initiative connects an open network of community input to the legal decision-making process.

--Eric

Maintaining focus on educating kids

"Core Versus Context in K-12 Education"

You have limited internal capacity. How do you determine what to do in-house, and when to seek resources from the outside to do part of or the entire job? 

Click here to download the article as a (PDF - 21.5K)

Website Development

ViKiwi has substantial experience with website development including:

• Ruby on Rails; Mongrel, NGINX, Capistrano
• Java platform
• Information Architecture - Site Maps, Website Design
• Quality Assurance; Continuous Integration
• Hosting

Vikiwi helps district determine where to get the biggest return for its technology spending

An urban district in California faced a common question:  where should it invest its technology dollars to get the best returns?  There seemed to be so many possibilities and so many needs, but it was facing yet another year of shrinking budgets. 

ViKiwi started with the district’s strategic goals.  They built a technology strategic plan around the district’s academic and business goals, detailing how technology could help increase student achievement, lower the cost of delivering business services, and improve communications. The plan also outlined where the infrastructure would need to be strengthened to support the increased use of technology, and described how E-rate benefits could be leveraged to upgrade the network across the entire district. The plan also pointed out the need to upgrade the helpdesk over time to ensure that everyone in the district, regardless of his or her initial level of computer savvy, could use and benefit from technology. 

To help the district plan its finances, ViKiwi highlighted a list of projects that would have to be funded within the next 18 months. Using this plan as a roadmap, the district was able to build a technology budget that supported explicit short and long-term strategies.  The district also has been able to use this plan to describe its technology strategy to foundations and other potential funders. 

ViKiwi working to help Oakland Schools with Technology

ViKiwi has been working with Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to improve how technology is used within the district.

As the interim Executive Officer for Technology, ViKiwi consultants have responsibility for day-to-day operations and the longer term strategic direction for technology at OUSD.  The district is conducting a nationwide search for a permanent hire. 

In 2006, Vikwi developed a proposal for the redesign of the OUSD internal website to support improvements to customer service, and analyzed and recommended search engine options for district use. This has been deployed on the OUSD public website.

To find out more about Oakland Unified School District, click here.

ViKiwi helps Louisiana district turn strategic plan from words into action

This is such a common story: a district develops a strategic plan but then the plan sits on a shelf or in a hard drive while everyone returns to what they were doing. So many organizations go to great lengths to mobilize its employees to develop vision statements, objectives and strategies that decorate walls and websites but struggle to convert the plan into meaningful action.

 

ViKiwi helped take this Louisiana district to the next level.

 

ViKiwi worked with district leaders to identify metrics that could show whether the district was making progress toward the goals of the strategic plan, and set annual targets for the district, and for individual departments and schools.  Its consultants also worked with department managers to develop tactics that could help the district achieve the targets.  To guide the process, they developed a handbook that described what was expected of all the key personnel, and the calendar they needed to follow – everything to drive a culture of continuous improvement. And they designed scorecards to let everyone to know where the district stood, at least quarterly, and developed the processes to gather the data to populate the scorecards. Finally, to help key district personnel do what was expected of them, ViKiwi provided coaching on project management, action planning, interpreting data, developing reports, and other essential skills to sustain the process. 

ViKiwi brings data warehouse back into operation

Several years back, an educational foundation had hired some consultants to build a data warehouse to archive student data.  But with passing time, the data warehouse fell into a state of benign neglect.  When interest in using the data warehouse resurfaced at the foundation, there was no one on staff who could update the data structure and load fresh data.   

ViKiwi provided the resources to bring the data warehouse back into operation, and extract raw data from district or state media and transform and load the data into the warehouse.  The foundation was then able to use the data warehouse to populate scorecards to evaluate the efficacy of its programs.   

Practicing Web 2.0 in Government

Federal Computer Weekly writes my presentation to the Spring Government CIO Summit  in 2007 in Ft Meyers FL.

For the full article, click here.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is also taking a gradual approach to a social-networking pilot program that will open the patent-examination process to the scientific community. The Peer to Patent Project, scheduled to begin next month, will test the use of a collaborative site to improve the quality of patents by giving patent examiners access to better information.

“We’re going to start slow by adding a small number of applications initially,” said Eric Hestenes, chief technology officer of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, which is leading  the project for USPTO. The project eventually will include 250 applications.

The project is designed to channel the correct information to patent examiners and make that information manageable for the examiners, Hestenes said. It also will help patent examiners, who are working under a backlog of about 700,000 patent applications, accelerate the examination process.

The political and technological moment is right to apply a social-collaboration technology to the patent-examination process, Hestenes said. “What we’re trying to do is tap into the collective intelligence of the [scientific] community. Rather than have patent examiners be the primary agent in researching patent applications, we’re hoping that the community will participate in that process. It’s a huge, huge change. It gives the group an opportunity to contribute.”

The Peer to Patent Project will allow    contributors to rate the quality of information so that only the most important data is provided to the examiners. Because of that filtering process, the site is technically not a wiki, Hestenes said.

The original presentation from the CIO Summit meeting can be found here

--Eric

ViKiwi helps CAO decide whether to kill a disappointing product or try again

The newly appointed CAO of this Ohio district had inherited an instructional management system that had been a disappointment since its purchase nearly 3 years earlier.  He wondered whether he should try to resuscitate the system or simply walk away and find something better. 

ViKiwi’s analysis showed that, as is so often the case with technology, the system failed to meet expectations primarily because of poor implementation, rather than the quality of the product itself.   Given that the licenses for the product had been purchased outright rather than by annual subscription, ViKiwi showed that it was in the district’s financial interests to re-launch the system.  ViKiwi detailed out an implementation plan that included making the system part of the district’s comprehensive initiative to raise student achievement, improving the stability of the network, providing a complete set of formative assessments at every grade, and strong project management to make sure all the moving parts hung together. 

Subsequent to ViKiwi’s final report, the district decided to give the product “another chance”.      

ViKiwi helps New Jersey district make some intelligent technology choices to establish a data culture

The Director of Accountability at an urban New Jersey district was trying to decide what technologies would help teachers use data to drive instruction.  He wondered whether it might be appropriate for the district to implement a “data warehouse” but did not know what were his other options.       

Vikiwi helped educate the members of the task force the superintendent had formed to help the district with the decision. They described the features of a data warehouse, a “student data mart”, an “instructional management system”, and other on-line products that claimed to facilitate “data-driven decision-making”, and showed how each fit into a comprehensive data architecture. They pointed out that there was no “one size that fit all” and how the superintendent would likely need a different tool from teachers. And they provided budget costs and expected timelines, and explained what the district could do to greatly increase the chances of a successful implementation. 

Considering the specific circumstances of the district, the task force recommended a three-phased approach over several years: first a data analysis and reporting tool; second an assessment and curriculum management tool; and third a data warehouse. Vikiwi wrote the RFP for phases one and two, and helped the district evaluate responses and select the winning vendor. 

ViKiwi joins Peer to Patent project technology

Hi all,

ViKiwi has been chosen by New York Law School to manage the technology effort for the Peer to Patent website. 

Here is the announcement

Click here to find out more about the project

Click here to view the website

Need a data warehouse? Read this first

Many K-12 school districts think they need a data warehouse.  There are now many vendors to choose from.  Some offer customized solutions, some are “off-the-shelf”; there are hosted services while others run on a local server.  All vendors claim a “user friendly” interface so why do you hear stories of systems gathering dust through lack of use?   What should you be looking for?  How do you start? How can you  ensure your technology spending is going to make the biggest difference where it matters?

Click here to download paper

 

ViKiwi helps Technology and Curriculum & Instruction set agenda together

The Executive Director of Technology of this North Carolina district felt he had developed a good strategy to build out the data management infrastructure, including a data warehouse, and tools that teachers could use to analyze and report student data.  But he lacked the buy-in of Curriculum & Instruction; he knew the projects would not be successful without their support.

ViKiwi helped charter a cross-functional team comprising key staff from Technology, Curriculum & Instruction, and the schools.  ViKiwi facilitated initial meetings, and introduced a decision-making and project management framework that helped the team reach consensus on project phasing and determine implementation details.  And most important, ViKiwi helped shift ownership of these projects from the Technology Department to this committee of both builders and users, establishing the precedent for future technology projects. 

ViKiwi helps restructure district administration to lay the foundations for an accountability culture

The results of the high stakes tests for this district in Northern California had been disappointing for several years. To turn the district around, the leadership determined there needed to be a stronger culture of accountability, but they did not know how to make things change. 

ViKiwi recommended restructuring the Technology, Accountability and Assessment functions to create an organization that was focused on using data to make decisions, and they helped hire a new cabinet level leader for Accountability and Technology.  Recognizing that accountability starts at the top, ViKiwi mentored cabinet level staff to “walk the talk”: to use management tools including charter documents, written operational plans, and monthly status reports that let colleagues know whether they had done what they said they were going to do.  And to help the new technology director stay on task, ViKiwi also developed a technology strategic plan that described where and how technology could strengthen accountability and help raise student achievement.   

Strong project management helps district score a technology success after recent disappointments

Many districts have come to realize that technology projects disappoint more often because of poor implementation, rather that the quality of the product itself.  However, these same districts often do not have the capacity to provide the disciplined project management that is needed for success.

ViKiwi is often called in to fill the gap.

After having its share of technology disappointments, a district in California engaged ViKiwi to manage the implementation of an assessment tool to enable teachers to administer short cycle tests.  ViKiwi developed a project plan for the implementation to an initial group of17 schools, made sure there was active participation by everyone who needed to be involved, and identified and fixed key issues as they arose.   Vikiwi kept the project moving along until everyone felt good about the initial group of schools.  Then ViKiwi helped the district successfully move the application into the 30 or so remaining schools in the district. 

ViKiwi finds irrational data infrastructure is the root cause of many of the district’s data issues

The leaders of an urban Ohio school district were planning to implement an assessment and reporting system to enable teachers to gather student performance data more frequently.  But horrible data quality had led to a general mistrust of any data coming out of the district; the CIO worried that superimposing the new system over the existing data infrastructure would only make things worse, killing the new system before it even went live.

 

Poor data quality usually is caused both by humans and by technology. The district engaged ViKiwi to help get the technology fixed.  ViKiwi found that the infrastructure consisted of several ageing standalone silos that had been built piecemeal over time, often without integration with the existing systems, and without regard for future needs.  Most of the data errors were caused by operator error, but many likely would not have occurred had the systems been more user friendly.  Furthermore, the complexity of the infrastructure increased maintenance costs.

 

ViKiwi followed up the analysis with a roadmap for the district to convert the infrastructure to a simpler, more scalable configuration that utilized more up-to-date technologies.