Major Release Change Management Tips (v17)

We understand that rolling out updates at your school can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you and your staff may be excited about new features or improvements to workflows. On the other hand, there will inevitably be reluctance to retrain the muscle memory and learn how to do things in new ways. So, we thought we would share a few tips with you; a change management cheat sheet that aims to assist you to minimise disruption, prepare, equip and support your staff to successfully adopt the new features and changes.

We have identified 5 key areas that will help you manage the change process below.

A successful change requires leadership or project owners to take the time to understand the scope of the changes and plan how to introduce them to the wider staff. We suggest that you:

• Review the provided release notes, webinar and documentation, including our doc that outlines the changes in Schoolbox from v16.5 to v17 for teachers.

• Set up a rollout management group and assign responsibilities (e.g. testing of beta release, establishing a group of champions, chasing policy decisions, etc).

• Engage with your leadership team to inform them and secure their endorsement and support for the planned upgrade/launch process.

• Collect data, as you go, about what works best when rolling out a release at your school. Design feedback loops for continuous improvement. You may not have data to inform your upgrade for this release, but it would be valuable to collect it for the next release!

Every school will have its own calendar of events that may impact when you decide to upgrade to v17. You may be introducing another new system at the school or have a jammed-packed PD schedule for the next term already. Things like this are important to take into account when planning your upgrade. We suggest that you:

• Plan early & be inclusive!

• Create a realistic timeline of tasks that the school needs to perform before you are ready to upgrade. This will differ from school to school, depending on what you aim to achieve and what new features you intend on using. We suggest that you decide on your end launch goal and plan backwards. We suggest that you:

  • Allow enough time so that your rollout team can test the new release with your own data. Make sure this includes testing of all your custom work.

  • Free up time and resources to facilitate testing, this may involve wrapping up other open projects you have under way and making use of your Schoolbox dev server. You can then contact us to schedule an upgrade.

  • Plan time for your teaching staff to familiarise themselves with the new interfaces and workflows around the submissions system. The time required depends on the depth of use in new areas and your past experiences getting your teachers up-to-speed.

  • Upgrade your school’s teacher course as soon as the updated version becomes available. Wait for the official announcement of the new course launch date before you book in PD dates for the staff.

• Delay the upgrade if necessary; control the rate and the amount of change you are imposing on your staff.

• Recruit champions to skill-up and accelerate adoption for the rest of your staff. Encourage them to get actively involved in testing the release on your Schoolbox dev server.

• Monitor test outcomes - refer, at a minimum, to the 'Things you should know' section of the Release Notes, and the changes between version 16.5 and 17 guide.

• Contact your Daily Organiser & PD leader to request time for training, resource preparation and relief teachers, where applicable.

• Test all your custom work as soon as possible and communicate with your Technical Account Manager to discuss any issues.

• Consider creating your own resources to present the new features and highlight the changes. Check out the Inspiration area of Schoolbox Help.

• Think about which are the best communication channels to reach out to your staff (team lunch, staff room announcement, email). Consider using a survey to collect the communication preferences of your staff; use the feedback to adjust your strategy.

• Distribute the available materials (e.g. links to Schoolbox Help, videos, release notes, in-house assets).

• Consider customising your Teacher Course to add helpful hints and tips for your staff.

• Use your internal communication tools to clarify and promote the new release (e.g: news articles in Schoolbox, staff newsletter or email digest).

• Leverage your marketing mechanisms to promote the new features to the wider community.

New policies and sign-off will be required for some of the introduced changes. Including:

Filters

By default, when you upgrade to v17, data filters will be set to display the same information that was visible prior to v17. If you want to customise the data visible, decisions will need to be made about which filters you will set as options and what will appear as defaults to your end-users.

This will impact teacher views of their 'Pending Assessments', 'Grades' and 'Markbook' pages, and student and parent views of the 'Grades' page.

It's important to communicate to all stakeholders about any changes you make to the information they are viewing on these pages.

Pastoral Care

A number of things have changed in pastoral care which may change the workflows of your staff using this module. Please refer to our specific pastoral care changes guide for an overview of new policy settings and tips on managing the transition with your staff. 

Terminology

If you intend on changing terminology within your instance, you will need to consider how you will communicate these changes to your staff. For schools using the Schoolbox Teacher Course for staff training, it might be worth creating or adding your own glossary to the Teacher Course and advising your staff that the language used in Schoolbox guides may be different to your own school's terminology.

Bar graph on student grade report

With the added ability to hide the box and whisker plot on a student's grade report, you may want to consider how you are going to communicate this as an option to parents and students. More than this, you may need to develop an internal process that outlines who will be responsible for making these changes.

It's also worth noting, that hiding the graph will only hide it from parents and students. The graph will remain visible when staff view the student's grade report. Staff need to be aware of this if they intend on showing the grade report from their perspective to students or parents. 

Plagiarism report for students

When deciding whether you are going to allow students to see their own plagiarism reports, you may also wish to consider how this will impact the workflows and submissions of students. With this added ability, students may submit multiple times as a means to check their own work for plagiarism. This could also impact on your internal policies around acceptable plagiarism levels.