- December 11th, 2008
Time to realise some benefits
- Andrew Brown
- Comments: 6 Comments »Tags: Aberdeen City, Angus, benefits realisation, Midlothian
Today a small group of folk drawn from Aberdeen City, Angus, Midlothian, RM and Learning & Teaching Scotland got together for a workshop with a consultant to look into the area of Benefits Realisation. Part of the day was spent thinking about the original high level strategic benefits that the rollout of Glow would bring for users and administrators across the country, but the majority of the day was spent investigating how these high level benefits could be articulated in a much more meaningful, practical way for schools and local authorities to make use of.
Early on in the proceedings, it became clear why so often in many projects the area of Benefits Realisation gets placed in the ‘too hard’ tray, and only returned to at the end of the project. Tragically, this would be all too late in the process for many projects to provide any meaningful benchmarking or comparative data. With a project the scale and scope of Glow, production of benefits realisation documentation will be of great value to those tasked with measuring the progress of the project, and investigating how Glow has directly impacted on teaching and learning.
The challenge we face is in producing documentation out of the high level strategic benefits originally scoped at the outset of the project, that provides meaningful guidance for schools, local authorities and national agencies to work with. Not an easy task, but with the benefit (if you’ll pardon the pun!) of Glow, a task that we can make collaborative so that many can contribute?
Early in 2009, we’ll set up a Glow group inside Glowing Potential at the national level of Glow that will look at benefits realisation. In this group, we’ll put the documentation up for all to see as we’re working on it. That way, those with access to Glow can discuss it’s development in the Glow group and help shape it into a framework document for realising benefits that’s of value to us all.
Imagecredit: Trays Modern by JeffK (altered AB)
Categories Aberdeen City, Angus, Midlothian
From my perspective in my school Glow is doing great.
However, isn’t just a little late to be doing this as the whole project will be reaching it’s end in 2010 and it will be 2009 before we start articulating the expected benefits to schools.
After all, in a lesson we wouldn’t wait till 3/5′s of the way through the period before we told the pupils the outcomes they should be achieving.
Also, I though that the Governments own green book on projects was very clear that projects of this sort must have a clearly defined benefits realisation plan and a framework to measure it from the start of the project?
Hi John – glad to hear things are going well in school. I would agree that it would be a little late if we were only beginning the process of managing benefits realisation, but we’re much further down the line than that. Forgive me for not explaining this clearly enough. The project does have a clearly defined benefits realisation strategy and high level plan of how to measure this. The work being done now is producing from this high level plan the process by which to collate evidence of achieving the stated benefits by measures produced both nationally and locally. Every local authority when they begin to roll out Glow articulate in their rollout plan how they envisage realising benefits – the work being undertaken now is how we collate these realised benefits into an aggregated mass for reporting purposes.
When you are considering this Andrew, might I suggest you try to find some way of surveying staff in schools and learnin g communities as their own perceptions of benefits realisation might be markedly different to those of the LA key contacts. Perhaps a GLOW survey might provide some useful data as well as random interviews and thematic analysis of the transcripts. Measuring benefits realisation has to be more than just subjective qualitative measures though – surely it has to include some drilling down into the perceptions of users and the experiences which shape those views. I think we have a divide between the optimist rhetoric of the national bodies and LA’s and the somewhat more pessimist rhetoric of many teachers at the ‘chalkface’ which can only be harmonised by some careful quantitative research. Do LTS plan to commission something of this sort with regard to the true picture surrounding benefits realisation ?
It should be borne in mind that some of us haven’t even rolled out Glow yet. I’m Project Manager for Edinburgh’s Glow project and as soon as I get the Customerr Agreement signed we’ll be up and running and can start rolling out. By the time we have completed the rollout, we’ll be at the point John Wharrie mentions and it will not be possible to get a true picture of benefits for Edinburgh. However, I also agree with Jaye in that surveying staff in schools directly would possibly give a more accurate picture. As Jaye says there is a lot of rhetoric from the national bodies and LA’s which is not necessarily in line with real classroom experience. My own concern is that while there may be a number of enthusiastic teachers, there will be an equal number of staff who find using Glow ‘challenging’ and who may decide to ignore it for that reason.
It’s great news that Edinburgh are coming on line with GLOW soon Alan – and it will be interesting to see how your own roll-out goes (as well as Glasgow’s). My own research paper into embedding ICT did throw up this issue of optimist/pessimist rhetoric as a common thread in any ICT initiative, and not just in the UK. I think both LTS and LA’s can play an important role in evaluating the true benefits to all users, both staff and students alike by addressing the findings of my own and all the other research into why teachers don’t use ICT, and in this case, the barriers to wider GLOW uptake, particularly in the secondary sector…
Good luck with your GLOW roll out in Edinburgh..
Thanks Jaye. Today is the first day back after the Christmas New Year break (as it is for you probably) so it’s time to take up the challenge again!