Major Release Change Management Tips (v17.5)

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 v17 to v17.5 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 v17.5. 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. Book in some staff PD time and get your staff to go through the Teacher Course v17.5 Release Project to get up to speed.

• 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 17 and 17.5 guide for teachers.

• 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:

Crocodoc Retirement

You will need to make sure you make the move to v17.5 before the Christmas break to ensure that all your files are successfully migrated before the retirement of Crocodoc. This will increase your disk usage, as files are migrated from the cloud and into your Schoolbox instance. 

Staff will need to be made aware of the new annotation system and that any student work annotated prior to the update of v17.5 will be stored as a PDF file, alongside student submission and feedback in Schoolbox. If you are using the Schoolbox Teacher Course with your staff, the new v17.5 Release Project in the Releases Unit will guide your staff through this.

ePortfolio Blog Improvements

Changes to the blog component on the eportfolio mean that when staff post to students' eportfolios it appears as them posting, not the student. You will need to consider how you communicate this change with your staff.

You may also want to take advantage of the new ability to configure notifications for eportfolios. If you do take advantage of this, you may want to consider any policies that are affected by this and how you will inform your staff of these changes.

Current Term Resource Booking

If you intend on changing resources within your resource booking module to be locked to bookings in the current term, you may want to consider informing your staff of these changes.

Usage Tracking

By default, usage tracking will NOT be turned on when you upgrade to v17.5. If you decide to turn this on to help us improve Schoolbox, you will need to manage sign-off and any policy updates that need to occur.