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 🙂

Why are some businesses more successful than others?

Is it because they provide a better solution technically?

Is it because they were first to market?

Or is it just luck?

You could say all these statements are true, however, more often than not it is the way you look at a solution and how easy it is for a potential customer to purchase, on board, reduce their pain, and continue to enjoy the experience of working with your solution and business. It’s all about reducing friction.

We work and continue to work with several businesses across the edtech world and, in the main, the majority of companies that are not growing as quickly as they would like comes down to how hard are they making it for customers to either buy in the first place or make it hard for them to choose to stay, its all in your power to solve!

Look at your Customer Journey, look at every step, and understand when you are making it hard for the customer/user.

Ask yourself:

• Have you made it easy for the potential customer to find you and know what you stand for? Where do they receive their information?
• Have you made it easy for them to purchase? Do they know you are going to take away a problem better than your competition?
• Have you made it easy for them to onboard? Through little to no manual or human interaction.
• Have you made it easy for them to get to the value? This may include human intervention to understand best practices, however, if you can make it light touch this is great for the business and your customer.
• Do you have processes of ensuring that the customer continues to have a great experience of the solution and the business? To make the decision to be loyal easy.

If you say yes to all these questions, ask one more! Are you looking at this from your perspective or the customer’s? If you answer from yours, as we know best, you are not reducing Friction!

A “Persona” is a fictional representation of an actual user and is applied in the early stages of product development or product redesign.

Personas are vital to the success of a product because they drive design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities.

The Benefits of Persona Development

If you don’t think Personas are worth the trouble, think again. Benefits include:

Personas give stakeholders an opportunity to discuss critical features of a redesign: This is especially helpful when you have multiple stakeholders with different ideas about what needs to be developed first. Using Personas to walk stakeholders through common interactions unveils frustrations and pain-points that will help clarify actual user priorities over the stakeholder’s personal wish list.

They help team members share a consistent understanding of the user group: Personas take data and make the stories more compelling and fun, thus making them easier to remember and consider when the team is working towards a solution – together.

Personas help designers develop informed wireframes and site architecture: Since Personas focus on the needs of the users, the team can walk through scenarios and determine optimal placement of content to specifically support the goal of the product. This is vital to the success of a website or application, and will save your client thousands in budget and/or man-hours reworking a product after it’s launched (and “officially” tested by actual users).

Personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product: This prevents designers and developers from applying their own mental models to the product design which may not align with actual user needs.