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State-wide Ed-Fi implementations are a high stakes process. Your district customers especially will be under a lot of pressure to get it right, and this is usually in addition to their normal day jobs. Anything you can do to relieve the stress and concern is time well spent. Following are a list of items that we’ve seen are effective in this process.

Development Practices

• Reduce your agile development cycles. There will be bugs and new development required at a high rate of speed, and (in some cases) your customers will need to see the corrections made quickly. Releases every week or even daily bug fix releases should be on the table. 

• Retain those cycles until you establish a good maintainable cadence – compared to flat file submission schedules, you’ll be expected to be able to implement changes faster and more often even beyond go-live year. 

• Assign additional development staff. Just like your district customers, your current staff probably have full time jobs apart from this process – you’ll need additional bandwidth. If you’ve never been through this process before, do not trust your gut. It is highly likely to take more cycles/hours than you think it will. 

Support Practices

• Weekly or bi-weekly support calls. Preload questions so that you can address them on-screen without displaying identifiable student data (PII) 

• In Person group bootcamps. You can do this via your user groups if appropriate or timely, but don’t wait on them. Showing up & being present will help communicate to your customers that they are being taken care of. We’ve also seen that doing this in person is more effective than virtual (but you should do virtual too as in person can be difficult to schedule regularly). 

• As above, assign additional support staff to get through the first several months. Make sure these staff aren’t simply cannibalized from other functional areas but are fully trained to understand the work flow.

Documentation & Communication

• Overcommunicate with your customers. Your customers will appreciate being kept informed about the status of their issues and your general preparedness. Do not rely on their ability to find answers to their questions in a knowledgebase or searchable support forum. 

• Overcommunicate with your SEA partner. They will be watching your product and support readiness carefully and you should be prepared to be open and transparent about your staffing and process. 

• Maintain a publicly available known issues list (aligned with Ed-Fi data elements).

• Publish FAQs, workarounds, and How-Tos. 

• Highlight recent product changes and procedure changes.