Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge      My name is Karen Gonzalez. I am ICT Director of a school in South Africa. Some fifteen years ago I co- wrote some software to manage the internal venue bookings at our school. Being a software  developer was and is still not part of my role at the school, but integrating technology into the  curriculum and empowering staff and children to become responsible and capable adults in a  technology rich world, certainly is. We developed the software because there was nothing  commercially available at that stage that suited our needs and pocket. Another reason was that, in  those early years, when we were trying to get staff to use technology to improve the learning and  teaching experience, we reasoned that giving teachers (and administrators) tools to do their daily jobs  would improve literacy and have positive educational spin offs. The software has lived on and is used  extensively by an increasing number of people and for more than the original, quite simplistic,  purpose. The software in function and form is very much end of life but the tool(s) is so interwoven in  the fabric of how we manage events, sports practices, and classroom activities that we simply can’t  manage without it for any time at all. The software is buggy and is written in a language that is no  longer supported. Our challenge is to seamlessly replace the software with something that will meet  the new needs of the school, without disrupting daily activities, on a very tight budget and at the  same time win the buy in of the various managers who will very likely need to change their process.    The project scope includes the marketing departments and admin, grounds and teaching staff across  our three campuses, each of whom are responsible for different and varying components within the  current booking system model; it particularly includes the academic staff who quickly and easily want  to book venues (including equipment and resources) for sport and teaching, with minimal fuss and  effort.     The project is limited to internal resources (i.e. budget and employee time) and there is no official  development team available. There is some in-house expertise with database and HTML knowledge  but the constraints of time and the competing needs of other educational demands is a challenge.     All systems in the school synchronise with active directory (which means resources, venues and  groups of people are seamlessly available for selection / contact) and a challenge is to offer a similar  feature in a replacement system. Not doing so would present overhead issues in terms of  management.     The IT team consists of the ICT Director, an ICT integrator, an ICT admin support person and the  Computer Studies teacher. The IT team is tasked with rolling out a replacement solution virtually  immediately as the current solution is causing frustrations. The school prioritises budget for  educational endeavours and simply doesn’t have budget to spend on an expensive commercial  solution. The budget is very much capped (non profit school)  and creativity is needed to deploy the  most effective tools within the proportional amount available for software.    Because of the urgency there is pressure to simply replace the current solution without a full  investigation into what is actually needed and why.

Selection    We decided to use the learning launch tool to deliver NOT a final product but a solution in the  making.    The design thinking process helped us understand expectations and needs. We chatted to staff and  students and used forms to gain further insights. We observed how staff were using the current  system and tried to journey map a wide variety of situations. We agreed as a team to put aside  discussions about solutions in the early stages and simply gathered as much information as we could.     What followed thereafter were some brainstorming sessions. The team invited a diverse range of  staff to join in and dream about what would be ideal in terms of managing bookings and the  brainstorming included, not only the booking itself but the event and after event activities too. We  sorted and organized our findings and from that came up with some design criteria, basic  functionality without which the staff would not be able to function. We also came up with a variety of  other needs/wants/wow factors that our staff had not really spoken of but that we surmised were  causing problems or frustrations or would perhaps add value. For example, when booking during an  exam time, the squash courts should only be available after teaching hours from a noise perspective;  another insight was that the teaching day doesn’t necessarily operate in typical calendar type time  slots and staff may want a view of their timetable when trying to book a teaching venue, which they  would think of for example as period 3, rather 10.05 am.     Another insight / assumption that emerged was that the different types of bookings could be  differentiated. The ‘booking type’ was identified as one of a possible three types

1. Teaching venue  2. Sporting venue  3. Pavilion, hall, theatre, chapel

The team then looked at free / inexpensive technology tools or solutions that could be adapted in  creative ways to meet the criteria and decided to prototype solutions for each of the three types.  We had closely observed the students and staff to uncover their unmet needs and used the  learning launch tool to work as a team through iterative cycles of live experimentation;  prototyping to test our assumptions, discovering and learning from feedback, refining and  relaunching the new prototype.     We began experimenting with existing software – Wordpress; Office 365 Cloud calendars and  HTML as well as free web software (and some paid demo software). We launched a number of  different prototypes to quickly test whether what we thought the staff wanted would make a  positive difference to how they worked.     Application      Our staff had a specific need; they wanted to be able to book venues. Several design ideas met that  need better than the current alternative because the process involved in booking one sort of venue  was very different from the process involved in booking another sort. All sorts of ‘Cloud’ features  offering anytime, anywhere access were also possible. Furthermore, existing controls were frustrating

for the staff and students; lack of control in management for more ‘public’ venues was also an issue.    Initially we focused on frustrations around booking the group venues in our resource centre. Students  traditionally made the bookings via their teacher but had no way of seeing which rooms were  available via the resource centre website, a place they would regularly visit to find research and other  material. We wanted to test our assumption (quickly and cheaply) that students wanted to be able to  book directly, in their current work space and that they would respect each others’ access to a venue  and not pre-book all venues in a way that excluded others from having a fair chance. Our resource  director who was frustrated by the current system agreed to give this a ‘go’.     We committed as a team to six things

1. Roll out a prototype within one week   2. Choose a particularly difficult student year group as they would push the boundaries and be

hard task masters

3. Focus on the assumptions of needs/wants   4. Question our own bias  5. Listen to feedback  6. Adapt, refine and redeploy as we worked

We met every day as a team for an hour to share our progress and review where we were at. We built  a web interface that made use of existing Office 365 calendars that we could overlay with the school  timetable and other features. There were buttons on the page that didn’t yet do what was ultimately  intended but gave the students and staff sufficient feedback. Feedback was immediate (a comment  button on the page), coupled with lots of interaction with the students and staff. Our first few  iterations of the prototype were very much work in progress but felt real.    Then team observed how the staff and students engaged with the software and were easily and  quickly able to test the assumptions about where responsibility could lie, where to host the solution  and how the features and screen should be arranged to best accommodate the requirements. The  team also spoke to boys and staff to find out if

1. Their needs had been met  2. They were ‘wowed’  3. What problems they could anticipate i.e. what could the pitfalls be (and boy did the students

come up with some curved balls!)

In this way, the team were able to quickly and iteratively roll out and test alternative suggestions /  improvements and adapt the solution on the fly. The outcome has exceeded expectations and work  will follow on tackling the other booking types in a similar way.    Insights    Involving the staff and students in the design of a new system had three positive spin offs.  Staff and students

1. were accommodating of mistakes and less frustrated with the current booking issues   2. made good (and bad) suggestions and those not accommodated are recorded for future

releases

3. have taken ownership of the process and collaborate to make it work

The IT team had felt responsible for the existing software issues but had been powerless to resolve  them. Through the design process they better understood the staff and students’ needs and were  more patient with human errors in the existing system, which will continues to operate in parallel  until all the features have been met in the new solution.     The team used data from feedback to resolve conflicts and get buy in a democratic way. There  certainly were challenges and frustrations. Real effort needed to go in to make sure that people felt  that they had been heard.    The speed of deployment was positive. Immediate feedback was hugely rewarding and in a ‘live’ test  even criticism felt constructive and was well received. The team were unanimous in preferring to  know virtually immediately whether they were going down the right road in terms of meeting needs.    The diversity of the group, who don’t normally collaborate in this sort of way, added huge value. The  management overhead on staff was reduced and the students were given a new responsibility within  a safe space.     Approach    Having identified our assumptions the iterative learning launch cycle tested these assumptions in a far  more satisfactory way than the traditional approach of delivering a solution that may/may not meet  expectations.  The below illustration attempts to describe the somewhat linear and limited approach  to a problem versus the more chaotic but yet more effective design thinking approach. We are  presently modelling design thinking principles in our planning for other component to resource  management and other projects.        An illustration of old approach      vs    New Approach

We intend to do formal training with our staff and with our students. It is so important that the  students we teach are not afraid to fail and that we create a space where failure is not seen negatively  but as a chance to learn and grow.

