Supporting Staff Professional Development and Implementation

Changing the way your faculty and staff do their jobs to incorporate a new tool can be a heavy lift. It is important to assess how the vendor will help overcome that hurdle by supporting implementation and providing technical support.

• Implementation consulting
• Technical support
• Communities of practice
• User training

Some vendors offer implementation consulting as part of the solution package. Colleges should consider whether they need this type of assistance given their experience level with data-led-decision-making because including it will increase the price of the product. Some vendors even assign the college a dedicated consultant to help them implement the tool. If that is the case, colleges should ask about the consultant’s experience with schools in their sector. A consultant that has worked with only small private liberal arts colleges may not be helpful to a large public flagship, for example.

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It may seem like a small detail but establishing who is responsible for which aspects of technical support is crucial for a successful rollout. Colleges need to know what technical support the vendor provides and who will be responsible for day-to-day troubleshooting. For example, when a high level administrator loses her password, who is responsible for quickly getting her access? If users do not have access to support for their questions, they will not use the system. It is also important to establish how the vendor will help after the launch with adjustments to the system.

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Many vendors bring their active users together, forming a community of practice. These communities are cultivated online and at annual conferences or regional meetings. If a college hires a vendor that has such a community, the school should explore it and see if it will be useful for the frontline users and others at the institution. These communities can provide helpful insight into what it is actually like to implement the tool and use it daily. While participants in a community of practice are self-selecting, they can still give colleges a sense of what using the vendor’s products is actually like.

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Well-designed training is key to helping faculty and staff adopt a new tool. Most vendors will train a group of people on the campus and have those people train others. This model scales more quickly and can get everyone on board in an efficient way. If the vendor has agreed to participate in a pilot project, a core group of people with knowledge and buy in has a head start on training. That initial training should also include staff members from the school’s institutional research office, so they can get a better sense of how the tool works and how it will fit into the college’s information ecosystem. Training and assistance should also be embedded in the system so users can get help as they face challenges with using the new software. Ideally, the training should go beyond just the technical and should touch on how these tools can change the way administrators do their jobs and also show how to interpret data appropriately, with implicit bias in mind.

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