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.     

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 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

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

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.

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 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