Bernard (4:36)

So what you realize is that, okay, we were confused about what part of the system to start developing, but then when we started mapping out the process, we understood that actually this onboarding team is kind of the center, kind of the catalyst for a lot of the other teams. So if we start there, then it will be easier to enable the other teams to take on the work because the onboarding team will basically trigger all of the other teams themselves. Right?

Bernard Agreste (5:04)

Yep. And I can give you an example if you're interested too. Yeah. So one of the things that the onboarding team did was make sure that teachers were legally allowed to be teachers. In California. And through our program, Teach for America, there was two kind of larger exams that they needed to qualify through. One was called CBest, one was called CSet, but it wasn't like one exam. It was CBest was for basic Skills, math, reading, writing. CSET was for your subject specific skills. Tons of different ways to qualify for those first skills. We didn't have a single way of tracking that. There was no automation. We were literally tracking in an Excel spreadsheet. And so when and when you're doing that for hundreds and hundreds of people at different deadlines across the year, right, that becomes really cumbersome. And so in working with the onboarding team, right, like kind of starting with them, that process impacted our partner teams for hiring. Because you couldn't interview someone to become a teacher until they had a minimum number of qualifications. It impacted program team handoffs. So once you became a actual teacher, it impacted the fluidity of, hey, I am now your teacher coach and I'm here to support you. Because the teacher coach didn't know what they needed to support their student. Their teacher was. It impacted data metrics because now we didn't know whether or not we were hitting our grant funding. And like it just keeps going and going, right? Grant metrics rather of how many was the percentage of our staff that is, you know, actually eligible to teach at a given point in time of the year. It just kept going and going and going. And even redesigning that one process impacted every single team and also made our onboarding teams lives way easier.

Bernard (6:55)

Yeah, absolutely.

Vasco (6:56)

So how did it go then?

Bernard (6:57)

So you understood that we needed to start from that onboarding team. What were the next steps?

Bernard Agreste (7:04)

The next steps were full project plans and timelines and all that fun stuff. It went really well. Right. I mean, I'm not going to say that this was like a project that had no hiccups, but like, we had a vision for what the goal was and we understood how, like, what the impact would be not just for our staff, but like downstream into the communities that we work with. And so that was really powerful because people were actually vested in the change. Right. There was no, like, there was obviously people who had differences, but we didn't have any, like, you know, ad card detractors. It was like people were genuinely on board with it and we just needed to then like realign on what onboard exactly meant technically. And at the end of the process, so we redesigned, we created these new six hubs for our, you know, our tool and you know, almost immediately we started seeing results. So we were better able to allocate our budgets. We were able to do like a deep background retrospective on some data and realize that the onboarding team budget for like how they could support teachers was actually not being used as effectively as they Could. And so we reprioritized spending money into getting one on one support for teachers for tutoring for these exams. And so that gave us a 25% increase over a year of first time success rates. So like more teachers were becoming more potential teachers are becoming teachers faster as a result of us being able to see the data clearer. Yeah.

Bernard (8:34)

So one of the things that is interesting for me is that typically it, let's say deliveries are complex, not only because it's hard to get to the requirements. And you illustrated that in your story by not knowing what team to start with and what did they need and.

Vasco (8:50)

So on, but it's also because why would they change?

Bernard (8:54)

I mean things are quote unquote working now. Why would we now start using, using the new tool? How did that part go? Because taking a new tool into use, it's usually one of the hardest parts in a IT tool deployment.

Bernard Agreste (9:09)

Yeah. And I mean this is where we spent a ton of time working with everyone on staff who needed to use the tool to really vest them in where their value add was. And I think the first thing that we did was not just say, hey, we're doing this thing. We kind of like said, hey, we are going to change this tool to make it better. And we want to hear specifically from you on how are you using this tool right now in a way that doesn't work for you, but if you tweaked it in some specific way would work for you. And like an example I could give around that was our coaching team, right? These, these coaches of teachers, they could see their portfolio of teachers and like, you know, give them grades and give them notes and give them feedback. But what they couldn't do was they couldn't cut the data in any way. So they couldn't differentiate between first year teachers or second year teachers. They couldn't differentiate between English or math or schools or districts or even things like gender. Right. There was no way to slice that data. And so they were downloading all this data in really manual, clunky ways to try to get like filters in place to analyze how they could support their teachers not just individually, but as a cohort. And so, you know, the coaching team just said, hey, like if you can give us this, it will make our lives a lot better. Right. And then once we got them, once we said, yeah, this is absolutely doable. Right. Then they got excited for the change. They weren't just like, oh yeah, another change, sure, whatever, I'll deal with it. They were, I can't wait for this to come out because it will actually make my life better. And the way we figured out how to make people's lives better was by, I mean, just ask them.

Bernard (10:53)

That's an important point because part of the, in an IT delivery process, part of getting people on board is to actually do that, to listen to them and to make them part of the story of what we are doing. Because at the end of the day, they will need to decide to use the tool.

Bernard Agreste (11:10)

Right.

Bernard (11:10)

Because if they don't use the tool, what we did is not going to help and the benefits are not going to materialize.

Bernard Agreste (11:16)

Nope. And I mean, that was what was happening already. We had a tool that, you know, had all this information, but it wasn't presenting information in a way that made sense to people. And so they just, they use the tool as like an export instead of like an actual tool.

Bernard (11:30)

Yeah, that's a story I've heard before. That was a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that, Bernard.

Bernard Agreste (11:35)

Yeah, thank you so much, Oscar.

Vasco (11:40)

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Bernard (13:28)

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Bernard Agreste (13:29)

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Vasco (13:32)

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Bernard (13:34)

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