At Open Text, we have a formal, repeatable, and proven methodology uniquely tailored for educational institutions rolling out the FirstClass suite of collaborative applications. This methodology has been successfully applied across a wide range of deployments to staff, teachers and students.
Planning and Design
Roles and responsibilities
Project team selection
Project team training
Collaborative suite identification
Collaborative plan delivery
Implementation: Installation, Configuration and Customization
Hardware, OS and storage subsystem installation
Software installation
Collaborative configuration
Customization
Initial content creation
Account creation
Deployment
Rollout plan development
Administrator, advocate and selected user rollout
Small-scale rollout
Large-scale rollout
Monitoring, Enhancement and Expansion
Adoption monitoring
Success modeling
Model application and proliferation
Best practice institutionalization
Adoption and expansion of collaborative tools within an educational environment occurs through methodical up-front planning and building on incremental successes. Before proceeding to the next level of adoption, goal achievement must be reached in the previous stage:
Stage 1: A need for collaborative tools to improve internal communication and/or the education process is identified. Senior sponsors are on board.
Stage 2: A planning team develops a detailed approach to introduction of the collaborative tool suite. Advocates and trial projects are identified and committed to the project.
Stage 3: Trial projects are conducted to validate the approach.
Stage 4: Lessons learned during the trial projects are used to enhance the initial stages of the broader rollout.
Stages 5+: Collaborative tools are rolled out to larger groups within the educational organization. Feedback is utilized to ensure that success is modeled and duplicated.
Close contact with customers following their deployments allows us to identify successful practices and build them into our introduction methodology. New customers benefit tremendously from the knowledge base developed through many educational deployments.
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