ViKiwi

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.

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.

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.      

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 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 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.