Project Meeting Minutes - 10/02/2023
Date: |
23/11/2021 |
Location: |
Holland Park Gardens |
Present: |
Brett, Hauke, Shirley, Natasha, Ben B, Faeza |
Apologies: |
N/A |
Minutes
Key discussion topics:
Schoolworks Teacher/Student Scheduling (switch from Learncube)
Student & Teacher Portals
Recording function or ability to upload video
Automated leaving certificates
eFlex integration
Learncube switch to Zoom
Hauke
Hauke mentioned general requirement to ensure that TLSE customers have a high quality experience at the school, and in relation to Schoolworks, the Student Portal and Booking Portals need to be improved/modernised.
Brett discussed that structural changes would take longer to change; however that styling of the site is possible using CSS (the site was technically modernised a few years ago with ‘Bootstrap’); so given a new design brief and supply of a new design this could be implemented reasonably easily.
Brett
General update on Schoolworks - v3.836 was installed Tuesday evening. The install took longer than expected due to a few install issues with Salesforce but all systems are operational with the exception of Finance Account Balances. There is an issue with the increased ‘ring fencing’ of Organisations in Schoolworks (Organisations are a parent hierarchy record of ‘School’ and were setup to cope with bringing London Canterbury as a separate limited company into Schoolworks). Specifically there are some cross border transaction issues (Receipts posted on the LSE bank settling LSIC Invoices) and an issue with older Legacy data migrated from EduPro and SW version 2.x
Another issue is that the LSO Organisation has it’s REF Numbering/Prefix switched off so there are a number of INV/CRE/REC/PAY records as a result created without a prefix or an Organisation link which will need to be addressed even though this Organisation will no longer be used.
These are being worked on and we hope to have this resolved mostly by Monday 13th February.
A major pending issue this upgrade fixes is the Schoolworks Portal compatibility with Pardot, and with this a new series of formula/calculation fields at the Account level which can be used to identify past/alumni students.
This weekend (to minimise disruption) SW will test the new Pardot settings and run a batch process to update these new calculation fields.
Brett also mentioned some new features in this release:
Estimate (Quote) Links
Agent Booking Portal
Faeza
Restaurant Passes
Faeza asked about fixing/improving the booking of Restaurant Passes and One to One tuition in the Booking Portal.
Restaurant passes are currently offered as a ‘Sundry’ booking type in the Booking Portal. (The reason for this is that when the portal we rebuilt some years, Restaurant Passes were no longer needed, so this feature was left out. When passes were sold again, we repurposed Sundry as a way of booking them. but this is not ideal as the Sundry screen was never designed for Restaurant passes and only allows ‘quantity’ (not date) based purchases.
Ideally, Restaurant Passes would be automatically assigned for Full Time courses in the booking process, but customers could optionally remove them. For Part Time courses the online booking system would have a ‘I would like’ screen so that customers can optionally add them. Consideration would have to made if a customer adds multiple courses and the behaviour of any added Restaurant Pass dates.
One to One tuition is not bookable in the booking portal. Instead Courses are configured as ‘weekly’ one to one course, (e.g. 10 hours/Week), so students book 'x' weeks of the 10hours/week courses and these are then subsequently cancelled internally and rebooked as a One to One Course, so that the One to One (hourly) scheduling system can be used to count down the delivered hours.
Both processes add risk (errors) and time to online bookings.
ACTION: SW to review the current Restaurant/Sundry setup and to advise the best approach/time line to implement properly. To Update by 17th Feb.
Additional Vertical Booking Portals
Faeza asked about configuration of the booking forms and course specific questions for new product(s) such as Home Tuition.
Brett mentioned that it is possible to have multiple portal ‘sites’ which can behave and look differently such as:
Text & labels
Different terms or even language
Breadcrumbs
Payment Options
Logos
Branding
In this upgrade - ‘Service Options’ can now be added to Courses, and these activate additional dropdowns - in a similar way to Accommodation - to capture additional metrics.
As an example - Young Learner Courses - we can capture requested ‘activities’ in the booking process. This could be used in a multiple of different ways.
ACTION: Faeza to advise SW on different sites/options needed and when needed.
Status Flag Completion Automation
Faeza asked if SW could progress the automation of Enrolment Status being set automatically to Complete when a student has completed the Booking. Brett discussed that the original spec of status was in relation to when processing was completed for a student. There are already these triggers in SW to change Status:
Enrolment Emailed (Invoice)
Enrolment Receipt
These could be used to add further to the status mix and ensure that the status is set to Complete.
Brett mentioned that triggering the Status based on dates is complicated as SW would need to build batch triggering mechanism to check each day if the Enrolment End Date had passed, and further triggering mechanisms to switch the status back to a <prescribed> status if the Enrolment End date was extended. Overall this could be a few days development effort.
A compromise was agreed that 2 weeks after an enrolment is ended, a batch would set the status to Complete.
ACTION: SW to confirm 14th Feb when this could be delivered
Upgrades
Faeza asked if pending SW upgrades, TLSE could be given more advance warning instead of the recent ‘on the day’ request.
ACTION: SW will advise in advance of an upgrade as much as possible (we will aim for 7 days) and if anything within the upgrade is likely to cause disruption.
Natasha
Natasha asked about the Pardot compatibility and Alumni fields as discussed with Richard. Brett discussed these fields are in the installed release but a batch process will be run over the weekend to update them.
Natasha asked about a number of days prior or after a student has finished their course as a trigger for Pardot activity. Brett mentioned a formula field could easily be created to generate this based on the Enrolment End Date, however additional work may be needed to consider how Pardot is ‘triggered’ by this as formula fields themselves don’t trigger an event.
Once the alumni fields have been populated, Rich can review the fields and the requirements with Morgan/Natasha.
ACTION: SW to send an update Monday 13th Feb after the weekend updates
Booking Portal Font Issues (Times New Roman)
Brett/Faeza/Natasha briefly discussed that the Booking Portal is using a Times Roman font. Brett mentioned he thought the font was licensed and hosted by a typography site via GIANT.
Natasha agreed to contact GIANT.
Update 10th Feb - Brett spoke to DEVs and got the site URL and previous history and emailed Simon Evans directly so no further action required for now.
ACTION: SW contacted GIANT 10th Feb with details of the previous typography URL. Waiting to hear from GIANT.
Shirley
Learncube/One to One Teacher to Student Scheduling
Shirley said London School wish to discontinue the use of Learncube, and switch to using Zoom as the online delivery platform combined with Schoolworks for Scheduling based on recent discussions with Claire and Ben B.
SW have proposed updating the current internal use Booking Screen so that IT Bookings can be assigned to a Teacher. The current Scheduling screen will be reimplemented within the Teacher Portal, so that Teachers can schedule themselves with their assigned Students.
The default ‘view’ for Teacher will be the ‘Student’ view - so that teachers will be able to easily view all their students for the current (or any selected) week:
The list will be restricted to view only the Teacher’s assigned Students (assigned by internal SW users) and with the ability to move/place/cancel their student’s lessons. The view will show students in other classes or other scheduled IT lessons (including with other teachers).
This, combined with switching the Student and Teacher portals to the new Lightning versions will vastly improve the visual and online (reliability) experience and decrease time spent on multiple data entry points.
Reuse of the existing scheduling screen will speed up the delivery which we expect will be several weeks away rather than months pending no unknown critical issues for SW. Noted that this weekend is the last week of the Salesforce Summer Release which can pose risks additional of emergency work.
ACTION: SW will review internally and update London School Tuesday 14th February with likely timeline for delivery.
Other - General
Automated Leaving Certificates
It would save time if the Leaving Certificates (and possibly Leaving Reports) would be automatically generated and emails to students as a batch process instead of the current manual process.
Brett discussed that this is in the product roadmap and that the next step in the next major release will be automated document creation in the Enrolment screen, which could be further extended for other automation. This is already possible in the Groups system.
SW will prioritise the One to One Scheduling but after that this could prioritisied.
ACTION: SW will update the Project with this item and advise which pending release this will be done
Packages
Hauke mentioned that Package functionality would be very useful. We discussed likely package types, Brett mentioned that this is in the product feature roadmap but is a difficult piece of work. Simpler ‘concurrent’ or ‘enrolment start/end date’ based packages could be easier and more likely to be delivered earlier (e.g. Course + Accommodation + Transfers + One to One) as the rules would be easy to define as we have many of them already. The more difficult packages would be serial packages; one course after another and describing them and how they might behave with school and/or student holidays.
Concurrent or Enrolment based packages are targeted for Q2/Q3 depending on what other work is added beforehand
ACTION: SW will update the Project with this item and advise which pending release this will be done
Level Assessment Videos
Shirley mentioned that live level assessments are time consuming and would there be a way of uploading a short video of a customer against their record.
Brett discussed LearnSmarter which is a native Salesforce app which could do this.
ACTION: SW to contact Learnsmarter and understand the viability of integrating with SW
Bug Reporting
Faeza mentioned that issues or bugs might not be reported to avoid SW doing additional work instead of working on TLSE priorities.
Brett discussed that SW development work is not always linear and it is useful to be aware of bugs so that they can be efficiently dealt with alongside other work at the right time. Brett also mentioned that sometimes a bug might manifest into something more significant which could involve a time consuming data repair, or it may help in identifying patterns across other customers.
ACTION: SW to send comms on how we prioritise work across customers and how we (generally) flow work internally
Date of next meeting
TBC