The Scenario:
When I began working at one institution, some instructors used Zoom (my preference), and some were using MS Teams to operate synchronous lessons. The student body at the time was growing, and the old method of recording attendance was cumbersome. There were new features on MS teams to use for teaching that the school was excited about, including its capacity to integrate into our LMS and track attendance, an essential feature for the school. A third-party tech company had shown the administration multiple options comparable to Zoom that instructors could use; plus, the school was interested in the new features at no cost beyond their existing issued MS Office accounts. Thus, the school instructed everyone to be on MS Teams with one day’s notice, and all Zoom accounts were cancelled. I switched to MS Teams without training or resources.
Switching to MS Teams was not seamless or successful. Students consistently had login issues, especially those dialling in internationally. Multiple new features did not work as they should, and as the student population grew, so did the problems with MS Teams. Instructors reported issues and were referred to our tech support company; they stated it was a user error because everything worked whenever they tried to investigate. To help my students, I undertook some online research to troubleshoot the issues they were experiencing and improve my management of the online classroom. The issue I found was that students dialled in as guests, not registered users under the administration. To have access to the features, they needed to be registered.
When the third-party tech company and administrators trialled the platform, the scenario of unregistered users was not considered despite this being the entire student body.
The time, effort and total costs of implementing and maintaining an MS account for each student were not viable for the school. As such, within a week, the school had purchased a Zoom account for all instructors, and the issue of integrating attendance into the LMS was put on hold. No training or resources were provided for the change in systems. We were given Zoom accounts on Friday afternoon, with compliance expected Monday morning.
Perspectives
The above scenario is from my perspective and experience as an instructor. Lack of training, time to adapt, and overall support hinder most changes I encounter in this context. In this case, the key project from the administration’s perspective was to find a solution to the cumbersome process of keeping track of attendance using the technology we already had, which was unsuccessful and still is to this day.
The issue had been identified from a project management perspective, but those making decisions lacked an understanding of the project environment, including the social and international environments (Watt, 2014). Stakeholders such as the tech company advising the decision makers also did not understand the environment, and the data used to inform their actionable knowledge was skewed because of this. Actionable knowledge is when data users collect and use the information, weigh the options and solutions and apply their judgment to make decisions (Marsh et al., 2006). They understood that MS Teams had features that aligned with the project goal; however, they lacked insight into the project environment, which meant they did not collect data to test for viability within the correct context.
The context of students being logged in as unregistered users could also be a failure in systems thinking, where there was a need to look at the whole system and all its components versus looking at the problem linearly (Conway et al., 2017). To me the greatest barrier to the project being successful was the lack of understanding of the system. Communication and consultation with everyday users before the application was rolled out may have improved outcomes because there would have been a greater understanding of this part of the system. Team members should be involved in project planning and aim to communicate in the same language (Watt, 2014). While the actual change was communicated regarding its occurrence and rationale, when the users shared issues post-implementation, the tech company was not speaking the same language as the users and was deemed incompetent.
From a management perspective, I understand you cannot always involve everyone in decision-making. Still, regardless of context (my past in restaurants or current status as an instructor), when I see change or projects fail, it is because they only consider some parts of the whole, and those making decisions are not the boots on the ground. Thus, the impact is only sometimes understood after the implementation stage. In the future, when dealing with change, I see myself consulting with those who need to execute the change before implementation to be informed by data where possible. If advance consolation is impossible, being flexible, supportive and open to adjusting accordingly is necessary.
References
Conway, R., Masters, J., & Thorold, J. (2017). From design thinking to systems change (How to invest in innovation for social impact). RSA Action and Reserach Centre. https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_from-design-thinking-to-system-change-report.pdf
Marsh, J. A., Pane, J. F., & Hamilton, L. S. (2006). Making sense of data-driven decision making in education. RAND Education- Occasional Paper, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.7249/OP170
Watt, A. (2014). Project management (2nd ed.). BC Campus. https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/
