A change of Student Management Systems (SMS) is a major project. I have personally seen perhaps 50 migrations and rescued several, but also seen a sizable number of IT managers forced to leave their job over the years as a result. I’ll share some of my learnings and consideration to improve your chances.

First, let’s look in place of an SMS: Student management systems are often the source of truth for school from being the main CRM and invoicing to academic results and student welfare. What has changed over the last years, as schools have embraced a more holistic approach to e-learning and IT infrastructure, student management systems have become a source to many other system – creating system dependencies as well.

As a consequence, switching such a wide reaching system requires a plan, with realistic timelines, resources and expectations, while business continuity and duty of care must be maintained, staff need to be trained and be able to get support, system integrations updated and most business processes you had in your old SMS will need a replacement or reconsidered.

Capability and cost/benefit analyses

The reality is that most schools are not well set up to deal with change management in general or quite simply the additional work required to do the job well. Most vendors also dramatically under quote the actual cost and time required. Let’s look at a crude cost benefit overview:

Important Preparations

1. Be clear on all business requirement and prioritise them against your strategic objectives.
2. Do a full risk/benefit analyses. The added value must easily exceed the costs of change multiplied by a risk factor.
3. Prepare a full project plan
   • Identify all stakeholders
   • Create a communication plan
   • Chart all dependencies
   • Align with vendor / third parties support capacity
4. Make plans for the mitigation of major risks:
   • Identify all time periods that are off-limits for changes, or that that critical functionality must be delivered: staff PD, reporting periods, exams, public holidays or term 1 invoicing
   • Duty of care: Medical and contact data must be accurate and available at all times.
   • Cash flow: parents must be invoiced and able to pay fees.
   • Ensure access to other key systems for staff.
   • Plan the cut-over between (live) systems in detail.
   • Scripting the entire data migration can minimise downtime to mere hours and eliminate dual data entry.
   • Utilise a monitoring tool such as PRTG that can check the availability of all your web services during the entire migration. You can restore services before users even notice!
5. Assess how capable your school is in planning and rolling out a new system, including user acceptance testing, user training, data migration and verification, updating and testing all existing integrations. Are third parties able to align their planning?
6. Identify within your school, the ‘innovators’ (3%) and ‘early adopters’ (12%) to champion and front-run the changes ahead. Ensure they can clear time, have reduce loading to make the project a success.

Important questions to answer

• In which jurisdiction is the license contract executed?
• Is the vendor open to amendment of their typically unfavourable contracts?
• Can your data be sold? This may seem far-fetched, but many ‘anti-plagiarism’ software licenses leave open the use of student’s works submitted. Is that student data deleted upon termination of the contract?
• Is the underlying database and its contents fully accessible to you – do you own your data?
• Is the underlying database fully normalised – so it can be used for automation without (manual) scrubbing?
• Does the vendor allow, and what options are offered, to you and third parties to integrate other services? Having such options allows your school to utilise best-of-breed solutions, reduce vendor-lock-in and opens up future synergies.
• Does the software integrate out-of-the-box with identity and access management software? For example, student network permissions can be fully automated from their general enrolment and followed subjects…
• Was the software developed for K-12 schools, or remains targeted at universities or different curriculum styles?
• Is it ready for an IB style of assessment and grading? Does it come with pre-installed curriculums for your state or IB? Can it do progressive reporting out of the box? Does it allow for external education providers?
• Is the software intuitive enough so it’s easier to adopt and reduces (ongoing) training costs?
• Has the software been audited for security? Does it have tamper-proof audit logs so a forensic analyses can be done in case of fraud?
• Given that most schools lack the capacity to manage change on top of day-to-day duties, does the vendor have staff available, or can third parties to lend specialist support, such as training, creating essential reports, do data migration and verification, when changing to their system? Have you budgeted for it? Does the vendor guarantee the quality of their data migration at all?
• Ask other schools how they rate the vendor’s support for ever-changing government reporting demands?
• Ask other schools how many tickets they have open with the vendor

Related business services
Formulation of requirements and cost/benefit analyses, product/vendor selection, project/risk management planning, data migration and validation, product implementation, integration, acceptance testing.