I have now been working with a number of companies across the Edtech market for over 18 years. The one thing that always inspires me is the innovative, engaging companies that want to get it right.

However, there are a number of companies that just do not understand the Education market.  And so, while they may have a great solution, they are not really working on their Product Strategy and how they need to adapt to a market where relationships and advocates are essential to strong growth and success.

The Education market is unique in many ways to other private sector markets and as an Edtech company you need to be able to talk the right language and work in a slightly different way. If I was a MAT or a school there should be 3 key things I would be looking for in a company, never mind the solution they are selling to me.

Relationship

Does this company want to work in partnership?  This means not going missing, once you have sold to a school or MAT.

A School is an exceedingly busy place with lots of challenging priorities for peoples time. The person in the office could be putting a plaster on a knee one minute and then dealing with the police on a bullying incident the next. But ultimately the children come first, not embedding a solution. A school needs support throughout this process and then ongoing support with new functionality and getting the most out of a solution.

Just because a school is paying for a solution doesn’t mean they are using it, eventually a school will stop paying and never go back. As a company stay in touch, help out!!

Also there are companies that can add support which are local to schools, engage with them to help make the most of a solution.

What the solution does now

Many schools don’t have the time to do an audit on their solutions, but I suggest they should. Remember, a solution is there to support a need.

Schools should look at their own processes and ask the question:

• Can this be done better via a technical solution or by a different solution?
• Are my incumbent solutions really meeting our needs anymore?
• Are our needs the same as a bigger school down the road? if not consider looking at lighter solutions or a reduction in cost due to the amount of the solution you are using.
• For the need that the solution meets, is the cost acceptable, is there an alternative?

Needs change along with your ambitions, so should companies to meet your needs.

The Future

Technology and challenges in schools are changing at a rapid pace. As a school or MAT you need to be comfortable that the Edtech partners you have are able to rise to this challenge.

To this end, I would be asking the companies you are working with for a view on their vision. Where they see the Edtech market moving towards, and how they are going to meet these future challenges for schools and MATs.

Gain an understanding of are they nimble or slow, will they let you down in the future? Will they listen to you and help find solutions to your needs in the future?

I am sure there are many other things a school or MAT is looking for in a company, when they are dealing with them, let me have your thoughts?

Last Tuesday I was fortunate enough to be invited to the SNUG MIS day (thank you to John and Dave from OSMIS for inviting me) which gave me the ability to directly compare MIS cloud-based solutions for the UK Edtech market. I have to say a lot of the solutions have moved on and are now direct competitors to SIMS, and it certainly appeared to be the feeling within the room of support team colleagues.  

I have always highlighted to Capita the need to bring out their SIMS8 Primary solution ASAP or the competitor solutions would catch-up and overtake what SIMS is offering schools/MATs (both during my time with SIMS and now as an independent consultant). This has now become a reality!!  

More and more customers are starting to realise this and have either decided to move or are challenging the status quo. You can see with Josh Perry’s analysis that SIMS are losing customers, especially in the Primary market.  This trend is only going to increase over the next 2-3 years in my opinion. 

The different MIS solutions major on different things to support schools, but what all of them are offering is a fully integrated solution where the e-payment (Scholarpack is an exception here) and communication solutions are just part and parcel of the MIS, they are not bolt-ons or third party solutions. In my view, here’s how they differ: 

Arbor

• Highlight how much they want to support the education of students by taking away the administrative burden of staff (incl. teachers).  
• A very clean UI/UX and had a strong MAT offering around analytics 
• The data analytics was not only MIS information, they were also drawing on national data to enable national comparisons.  
• The message coming from the company was very much “we want to work with you” and all about partnership. Great message and one that resonated with the audience.

Bromcom

• Major on their integrated BI analytics, it looks really strong.  
• Their message was a little more corporate.  
• Very simple looking solution (which is a positive!) and had adapted their solution to provide a strong UX and UI for Primary and another UI for Secondary. That said, some of the screens were a little busy. 
• They are definitely listening to their customers, which I am not sure the industry had felt up to this point.  

Pupil Asset

• Major on their tracking solution which is very well received in lots of schools across the country, and many schools go on to switch to the full MIS as a result of their good customer experience 
• Strong reporting functionality with their ‘School On A Page’ and ‘MAT On A Page’ reports 
• They also have something innovative (which, to be honest, I feel they should focus on more) in their ‘Live School’. This gives a visual view of the school e.g. if there is a behaviour issue in the school, in a visual model of the school you can see where the incident occurred. 

Scholarpack

• This is a solution focused purely at the primary school market and this is their strong brand, providing a solution that fits the primary schools. 
• It may not be as deep in functionality as some of the other solutions out in the market, but that light MIS is what primary schools want in my experience (most primary schools don’t use half of what is included in the deeper MIS) 
• Their MAT offering was light.  However, they are bringing out more MAT functionality soon. 
• I think they have hit the Primary segment spot on. They will need to look over their shoulders a little as Bromcom and Arbor also have a Primary solution and as MATs get larger with multi phased schools.  My experience is that they look for a single offering for all phases (most large MATs have either gone to Arbor or Bromcom) so this may become an issue for them in the longer term. 

Now for my request from the different MIS providers (and this includes SIMS): a lot of what I saw was very similar functionality to SIMS7 but it was either implemented better or the UI/UX was a lot stronger.  However, all the presentations continued to refer to SIMS as the standard.  I feel everyone should look to be further on than this. They are already comparative to SIMS – I think schools and academies need them all to think about what the true next generation of MIS is! 

I’d like to see more on workflows, reducing the need for manual intervention. I’d also like to see more on Data Analysis and the use of AI/machine learning to provide true insights as to what is occurring in the school/MAT.    

It’s one thing answering the questions where MATs and schools know they need an answer. But how do you answer the questions they don’t yet know they need to ask?? 

In Systems engineering and Requirements engineering, a Non-Functional Requirement (NFR) is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours. Previously this would be mainly Architecture of the system. For example: Scalability, Accessibility, Capacity. These are all still important, however, it should be about more than this in a SaaS world!

Why do I think this is far more important then ever to get right? From an Architecture perspective, you need to get this right or you will have heavy costs fixing issues in the future. But more importantly you should be setting out to the business what are your expectations of the overall customer experience. You have to remember that software is not a solution on its own, everything from the purchasing journey to the training journey and how you are going to support your customers, are also part of the overall solution, and getting this right will retain customer loyalty.

When thinking of your NFR, think about the experience you want your customers to have and draw out all these journeys, so that every area of the business is aware of their responsibility.  Some questions to ask are:

• Are we going to offer free trials? If so, how are we going to support them? What do we need from development, sales, pre-sales, marketing?
• What is the work flow for customers to purchase? Do we have Account Managers selling? Are we expecting customers to purchase from a portal? Who across the business needs to be involved?
• Are we going to do all training online? Will this be self service? Do we have partners who need to train the software? Are we going to sell the environments?  Who across the business needs to be involved?
• How are we going to support our customers, once they are trained and on-board?

There are many more questions, but all of them will have a potential impact on the overall solution (incl. Architecture) and customer satisfaction. Once you have been through this exercise, most NFRs will be the same for subsequent solutions. But always review the NFRs and learn how you can make the solution better.