Home Base Project Status
Week Ending January 31, 2014
February 4, 2014 Webinar
Weekly Home Base
Project Status
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Successes and Recent
Accomplishments
Major Attention Areas
Calendar – Future
Updates/Releases
Professional Development and
Training Schedule
Weekly Performance Indicators
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments – PowerSchool /
Clusters
• There has been solid progress cleaning up data, fixing bugs,
providing enhancements and pushing out new features as
they become available. For example:
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Corrections to extra point calculations for weighted GPA
Loaded an initial phase of historical test scores (EOC)
Corrections to historical course number and course name
Enhancement for statewide student search
Significant progress made to clean up race and ethnicity
• Analyzed and determined root cause for inability to save
attendance was related to school settings in PowerSchool for
processing district attendance in the background. Issued a
communication on this Tip/Trick.
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments – Schoolnet
• Pearson has initiated a large team of application
architects and specialists and has begun a very
methodical analysis of Schoolnet system
performance, making hosting configuration changes
and code changes to improve performance.
• Many LEAs reported improved Schoolnet
performance during the week of January 13, 2014.
• Additional issues were addressed during the week of
January 20 and 27, and performance has improved
significantly since early January.
• Users will see incremental improvements in
Schoolnet performance over the next few months.
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments – OpenClass
• Continued rolling out OpenClass to LEAs in waves.
• To date, 19 of the LEAs in waves 1 and 2 are
currently live and can actively use their Home Base
OpenClass site.
• As of January 24, 2014, forty-three LEAs in waves 1
and 2 have been trained on OpenClass, and we are
now beginning wave 3 rollout.
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments – Educator Evaluation
System
Professional Development Tool Pilot #1
• Provided direct login access to the Educator Evaluation
System so that users are still able to access the system
directly if they encounter issues with the PowerSchool
SSO connection or if PowerSchool is down for
maintenance.
• Completed a successful pilot of the Professional
Development tool by delivering the course, Introduction to
Universal Design and Learning through the Professional
Development system platform to a group of registered
students.
• A second pilot began February 2 and runs through March
2014 followed by general rollout of the Professional
Development System to all LEAs.
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments – Home Base Support
Center (HBSC)
Staff and Process Alignment
• Staff coverage fine-tuned to better meet current load demands.
Improved process to respond to tickets more quickly.
• Goal: respond to any customer service request within a
maximum of two business days.
• Customers are assigned a specific Support Center agent and
ticket priorities are assigned based on impact and severity.
Pearson on-site Support and Assistance
• Starting in January, Pearson provides an onsite support
representative available inside the HBSC to provide additional
expertise.
• This facilitates more timely resolution of issues requiring
deeper product knowledge, reduces issues escalated to
Pearson technical support and directly transfers knowledge to
HBSC staff.
Successes and Recent
Accomplishments –
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
New Regional Support Model
• Regional personnel added to provide additional support.
These people will constitute mini-support teams of both
Pearson and HBSC staff.
• Pearson regional support staff of Implementation
Project Managers (IPMs) and HBSC staff have been
assigned as primary contacts to specific regions.
• Additional changes are planned to restructure and
reconfigure call menus, call routing, the Remedy
ticketing system and staffing models to fully support this
regional model.
Major Attention Areas
PowerSchool / Clusters
Attention Area
Status
State Compliance Reports Principal’s Monthly Report (PMR ) fixes are in NCDPI quality
assurance (QA) now and the new release (set for the 2/7
maintenance weekend) is expected to be a significant improvement
over earlier releases .
In addition to PMR, the following items will have updates to
previously identified issues (set for the 2/7 maintenance weekend):
• Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG) Data Collection –
Updated
• Dropout Data Collection and Validation – Updated
Student Transfers Across
Districts
Student Transfers across districts currently under development.
NC Transcript fixes
Corrected an issue where total saved credits were not showing
correctly in the transcript performance section. Newly saved
credits will now be recognized correctly in production.
Athletic Eligibility
A work-around for Athletic Eligibility was delivered as a stopgap
until this feature is ready.
Major Attention Areas
PowerSchool / Clusters
Attention Area
Black Box (Emergency
Contact List)
Status
An alternative solution to provide student emergency contact
information is being investigated and is in NCDPI QA.
Auto-Dialer
Currently in NCDPI QA.
System Performance
Weekly server restarts (Sunday 12 a.m. – 4 a.m.) are occurring to
proactively address PowerSchool performance concerns. Ongoing
monitoring is underway and will continue to ensure service levels
are met.
Major Attention Areas
PowerSchool / Clusters
Attention Area
Status
Outstanding Requirements NCDPI finalized business requirements for many outstanding
PowerSchool contractual deliverables including NC Customizations
Finalization
for:
• Grad Plans
• Athletic Eligibility
• Historical Data
• Accountability
• SADLS (Driver Eligibility)
• Academically and Intellectually Gifted - Phase 2
• Auto Dialer
• Black Box
• EC CECAS (Phase II and Phase III)
• Standards-Based Report Cards (SBRC)
• Lottery System Interface
• Teacher License Area Tracking
• Phase 3 Test Score Imports
Pearson will confirm delivery dates for these deliverables after
completing requirements review and high-level specs.
Major Attention Areas
Schoolnet
Attention Area
System performance
Status
In early January, districts encountered poor system
performance in Schoolnet. Pearson assessed the situation
and made infrastructure changes that included adding
processing capacity and tuning application code to improve
performance. Pearson and DPI have performance
monitoring tools to monitor system performance and take
corrective action. End-users will see incremental
improvements over the next few months until system
performance and availability comply with our Service Level
Agreement.
Major Attention Areas
Educator Evaluation System
Attention Area
Log-Ins
Status
Provided direct login access to the Educator Evaluation and
Professional Development systems, which allows end-users to
access the system without logging in through PowerSchool. This
new feature has enabled LEAs to continue to use the Educator
Evaluation System whenever they encountered issues with
PowerSchool single sign-on (SSO) and when PowerSchool was
down for maintenance.
Major Attention Areas
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
Attention Area
Outstanding Ticket
Resolution
Status
Developing and implementing a plan to address resolution of
outstanding tickets submitted prior to January 10 across all
responsible areas (HBSC owned tickets, NCDPI subject matter
expert (SME) group owned tickets and tickets directed at Pearson
IPMs. By eliminating the backlog of tickets that are able to be
resolved (issues not awaiting downstream vendor development),
HBSC staff can better focus on incoming incidents across all
priorities and address issues in a more timely fashion.
Plan established to identify, organize, assign and follow-up on
tickets for all responsible parties/teams. Ticket assignments and
resolution process distributed to all support areas starting January
14. Activities to date resulted in resolution of 670 tickets from this
ticket group.
Major Attention Areas
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
Attention Area
Improve Customer
Responsiveness and
Incident Response Time
Data Quality Initiative
Status
Improve ability of the HBSC to respond to any customer service
request within a maximum of two business days from the time a
ticket is submitted.
Customer response plan established and shared with the HBSC staff
on January 10. As part of this response plan, customers are told
which HBSC agent will be handling their issue. Ticket
impact/severity will dictate response priority.
Establish daily operational and periodic data quality/cleanup
process, as data quality is essential to effectively drive analysis,
preparation and managing HBSC operational effectiveness.
Focused on issue categorization and LEA data for initial activity.
Improved data quality in these areas from 61% to 90% by the end
of December. Continuing to monitor and address data quality
going forward.
Major Attention Areas
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
Attention Area
PCG Consultant Report
Status
Public Consulting Group (PCG) was invited to come to NCDPI and
perform a complete evaluation of the HBSC and provide
recommendations for improvement in the areas of operations,
ticket management and telephone support.
PCG spent two days in December working with HBSC staff
understanding the operation at that time and were provided with
insight from HBSC management as to issues, needs, objectives and
current plans to address. PCG was also provided with numerous
process and data files to assist in their analysis. Since the visit HBSC
has been interacting with PCG providing insight and clarity to assist
in their analysis and recommendation.
Received PCG analysis and recommendations document.
Major Attention Areas
Home Base Support Center (HBSC)
Attention Area
New Regional Support
Model
Status
Each region will have dedicated primary resources to provide the
first line of customer support. These resources will constitute minisupport teams that will be made up of both Pearson and HBSC staff.
HBSC and Pearson regional support staff (IPMs) have been
assigned. To fully support this regional model, the HBSC Call Center
menu and call direction/distribution will need to be restructured
and configured, as will the HBSC call staffing model. In addition,
the Remedy system will need to be reconfigured to support better
management of the regional support teams. ITS has been
contacted on both fronts for assistance.
Regional Support
HBSC Mini-Teams
Region
HBSC
PowerSchool
HBSC
SchoolNet
Pearson
IPM
Region 1 – North East
Christie Newkirk
Cheri Arthur
Carrie Hubbard
Region 2 – South East
Bonita Chasten
Cheri Arthur
Melissa Conover
Region 3 – North Central
Michelle Gresham
LaKesha Williams
Bonnie Coleman
Region 4 – South Central
Walt Raif
LaKesha Williams
Sherry Johnson
Region 5 – Piedmont-Triad
Evelyn Herbin
Tiffany Strickland
Marty Schmidt
Region 6 – South West
Gail Veach
Tiffany Strickland
Stephanie Roberts
Region 7 – North West
Tessa Parkerl
Emily Kline
Karen Rico
Region 8 - Western
Maurice Jordan
Emily Kline
Kathy McKinstry
Wake
Penny May
LaKesha Williams
Mike Schecher
Cumberland/WSF/Guilford
Gwen Bissette
LaKesha Williams
Vince Piscopo
Calendar – Future Updates/Releases
Timeframe
System / Organization
Component / Feature
February 2014
Educator Evaluation System
Deliver improved evaluation
screens (to reduce
horizontal scrolling required
in current screens)
February 2014
PowerSchool / Clusters
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February
Schoolnet
PMR/GRS fixes
AIG Enhancements
Initial Dropout
Reporting
EDDIE integration
turned back on
Course & Section
Enhancements
Ongoing Statewide
Alternative Report Card
Hotfix to improve caching
function in web tier.
Calendar – Future Updates/Releases
Timeframe
System / Organization
Component / Feature
February
Schoolnet
Migrate Schoolnet to
data center with
dedicated hardware
Late February 2014
PowerSchool Clusters
CTE Concentrator Survey
February/March 2014
Professional Development
System
Conduct second pilot
course “Effective digital
strategies for teaching
and learning in the K-12
classroom”
March 2014
PowerSchool Clusters
Title X Homeless and
LEP/WAPT
March 2014
Schoolnet
Schoolnet version 15.3
expected in Production
March 2014
PowerSchool Clusters
Title I ESSR
April 2014
PowerSchool Clusters
Title III Immigrant
Calendar – Future Updates/Releases
Timeframe
System /
Organization
Component /Feature
April 2014
Professional
Development System
Professional
Development Tool goes
live for all LEAs.
July 2014
Schoolnet
Schoolnet version 16.0
slated for Production.
Summer 2014
PowerSchool
Statewide StandardsBased Report Cards
(SBRC) expected in
production.
Calendar – Future Updates/Releases
Timeframe
System/ Organization Component / Feature
Fall 2014
TestNav Summative
Assessment
Add summative
assessment component
(TestNav) to the Home
Base suite of
applications. Pilot
Summative Assessment
capability by delivering
10 of the 30 NC Final
Exams through the
Summative Assessment
platform.
Professional Development
and Training Schedule
PowerSchool Scheduling training is well underway
http://www.nc-sis.org/calendar_February.html
Home Base Symposium is February 17-19: http://www.ncsis.org/symposium14.html. Due to weather, we have extended
Early Registration until February 7.
For more information about professional development and
training, please see
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/homebase/training/schedule/ and
http://bit.ly/12txEvM.
HBSC - Weekly Performance Indicators
Incident Management
Weekly Submitted vs.
Resolved Home Base
Tickets
Submitted Resolved
% Resolved
245
192%
Outstanding Ticket
Resolution - (pre 1/10/14
Resolutions (week)
Total to Date
325
670
submissions)
471
HBSC - Weekly Performance Indicators
Call Center
Weekly Calls - % Home
Base calls reaching an
agent - (HBSC staff answer
Reached an Agent
Unanswered (eMail)
91%
9%
Calls
Average
Wait Time
235
59 Seconds
other telephone support
requests in addition to Home
Base)
Weekly Home Base
Calls – Average Wait
Time
HBSC - Weekly Performance Indicators
Weekly Backlog
242 tickets waiting to be picked up by HBSC or members of SME groups
where tickets are assigned
Top Five Issue Categories for the Week
• Marks
• State Reporting
• Scheduling
• PowerSchool Reporting
• Instructional Tools/Content
New Weekly
Project Status
reporting will be
available online
starting Feb. 14.
Questions?