We’re delighted to welcome one of our LA Support Team colleagues to our #FinnemoreFireside chats. A huge thank you to Ollie Burnett, Systems Lead at Coventry City Council, who talked to me about their work with schools and plans for the future.

Ollie has been in education since 2003, is passionate about education and aims to improve the experience for students and teachers through his work. It’s a great conversation and, amongst other things, we talk about:

• Having a vision for the future relies on consultation with the SLT, partnering with more suppliers, but ultimately listening and then delivering for their schools and MATs.

• How Support teams should understand the school’s context and goals, offering solutions beyond specific products.

• The importance of Support teams to schools in helping them navigate software and processes.

• How User Group sessions and sharing best practices among schools are promoted to enhance learning.

• The challenges of transitioning to new systems, praising the support provided by suppliers. Ollie highlights the need for training and consultancy services due to the shift to cloud-based systems.

• Support teams are becoming more consultancy-based in the future and collaborating closely with multi-academy trusts (MATs) to meet school needs.

Ollie also chats about the process they went through during their recent MIS switch and why they chose Bromcom. In total, 75% (45) of Coventry’s LA-maintained schools chose to move both MIS and Finance, with the Authority implementing the switch in only 3 weeks by working in a 3-way partnership between the Coventry Support Team, the schools and the supplier. It can be done!

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Working with MIS

We’ve been lucky enough to have worked with most of the maintained MIS suppliers including SIMS (then owned by Capita), Arbor, IRIS Ed:gen, Pupil Asset, and, at the time of writing, working with Bromcom as they grow their user base across the UK.

We’ve recorded tons more #FinnemoreFireside chats on the topic of MIS with MATs, school leaders, support teams, suppliers and independent consultants which you can find here or subscribe to our You Tube channel for regular updates.

Other brilliant free, independent resources we’d recommend you take a look at include WhichMIS and BringMoreData, We also run a LinkedIn group ‘The Future of MIS’ which seeks to understand the new role of MIS in schools and explore what it will look like in the future – come and join the conversation 🙂

We’re kicking off the summer term with our next #FinnemoreFireside, this time with Derek Hills,  Director of IT, Systems and Data at Ark, a charity and network of 39 schools that aims to transform children’s lives through education.

Derek has a wealth of experience leading first-class Data and IT teams, having previously worked with other MATs including Harris Federation and David Ross Education Trust before taking up his role at Ark. He knows the MIS landscape well and we had an interesting chat about what the future of MIS might be, including topics such as:

• Where does Derek’s passion for data and analytics come from, and why does he love working in education?
• What can be achieved by sharing data, info and best practice
• Where he sees AI fitting into technology budgets and the broader education landscape
• Are schools getting enough out of their edtech and systems, and are they utilising it effectively?
• Consolidating solutions means investment can go into teaching, but what are the challenges around open data policies?
• The importance of working in partnership with suppliers and forming long-lasting relationships
• What Derek would like to see more of from edtech companies

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.