UX Architect | Project Manager | Technical Lead
Project Overview: Faced with a 75% reduction in staff at schools from an average of 4 technicians per campus to 1 technician per campus due to revenue challenges, we were tasked with simplifying the classroom IT support platform to ensure that systems and services were in place to deliver the curriculum at the same level with reduced support staff. It is the classic ‘do more with less’ scenario. We needed to simultaneously create a solution that was easy to use and powerful for the entry level techs to execute the work they needed to do on a daily basis while also designing a business process that would provide a high level of system uptime and stability for students and faculty to use.
The Problem: While all 52 campuses taught the exact same curriculum, the IT platform and tools used to deliver the courses and provide students with software and services were largely unique at each campus. As schools were unable to fund an IT department at the size they were historically, schools were faced with complaints from students and accreditation boards about the lack of stability and consistency in the IT services provided on campus.
Some of the technicians who worked across multiple campuses complained that going from one location to the other was like going to a completely different company. Many of the tools were so complex and customized that it took many months to onboard new IT employees when turnover occurred. The Art Institutes needed a new classroom technology platform and toolset delivered and running within 6 to 9 months to appease accreditors and provide better service to students and faculty.
Research Findings:
We analyzed data from support tickets that were opened over the last 12 months revealed that every school had stability and technology issues but they were largely unique from one location to another. Where one school would have a problem with 3D software, another school had a problem with font management.
The existing toolset was too customized. Every campus developed their own suite of software installation and drivers, known as an “image”. Basically this image was a capture of a perfectly running computer with all software installed that would be cloned to other like model computers. Many schools devoted almost a full time resource to maintaining these and most of them had at least 6-8 of these images to maintain.
The schools had a lot of excess server hardware and many of them provided network storage for students and faculty that was not maintained. As a result schools were continually purchasing additional network storage. Researching the kinds of data stored on the network we found anything from pirated movies, music, and software to the only copies of many students work and none of it was being backed up. This represented a huge risk to the schools from a compliance and regulatory perspective. In addition, when talking with end-users they didn’t feel strongly that network storage was that important to them, and that it had basically turned into a ‘dumping’ ground.
The corporate IT department that oversaw many core services for the Art Institute had purchased a new centralized management suite that would address some of the complexities but while it had been purchased over three years prior, it was never rolled out because the schools could not agree on a standard platform and centralization requires standardization as a prerequisite.
The schools did not have the funding required to do a full-scale replacement of hardware and software, nor did they have the resources to hire additional staff to support a protracted migration schedule. Any solution needed to be done as a zero sum game and ideally save money in the long run.
Personas:
UX Challenges:
Limitations of 3rd party software. We have limited capabilities with-in the 3rd party software tools being used to modify the UI and make the software easier to use. To address this we developed a specific organizational structure to present the software, workflows, and images in a specific way and conducted bi-monthly “Tech Talks” training sessions for field technicians to help them become familiar with the new standards.
Consistency & culture. Automation emerged as a key feature of the system once we determined that every school would look and function the same way from an IT perspective but we were having problems getting good results with roughly 15% of systems failing automation tasks. We found that if the workstations in the school were named in a consistent fashion, we could automate a number of tasks such as software upgrades targeted to specific labs. We developed a naming convention and trained the technical staff that if they named their systems correctly, roughly 40% of the mundane maintenance work that they needed to do on a regular basis would be automatically handled by the centralized management system.
Solution Design:
We developed a centralized and standardized classroom infrastructure platform and designed tools that provided simplicity and consistency for technical staff to perform their day-to-day tasks. The result was a solution called ‘Classroom in a Box’ which consisted of a virtualized set of servers running on a single piece of hardware using an open source Linux solution. We centralized much of the development work using a small team of senior IT employees and then provided training and tools to the campus based technicians. All heavy technical lifting was handled at the senior level and abstracted away from the field technicians. We were able to successfully implement the software solution that the organization purchased several years prior and we tailored the interface of that tool to be simple enough for entry level technicians to do complex technical work.
Design Principles Used:
Results:
Lessons Learned:
Going into the project we did not anticipate how much of a culture shift was going to need to occur for this to be successful. Particularly with the technical staff on campuses who felt that their self-worth as an employee was tied to the customization and complexity of their computer infrastructure. Balancing the need to simplify, automate, and eliminate activities that were redundant or provided little value while trying to reassure the technology staff that they were vital and important to the mission of the school was a bit of a high wire act. Once they began to use the new tools to provide support services to end-users and when they found the new tools to be simple and consistent they got the credit for how well things were working on campus.