The Durham Public School district (DPS) is a K-12 public education district in North Carolina, encompassing 53 schools. There are 29 elementary schools and 24 secondary institutions, comprised of 34,000 students and 4,000 faculty and staff. The mission of DPS is to work together with parents and the community to ensure that every student receives the best possible education that enables them to discover their interests and reach their full potential.

Challenge

In North Carolina, the state mandated that every school district track School Improvement Plans (SIPs), which before the introduction of BrightWork, was a paper document that principals submitted once a year and was subsequently tucked away in a file. Follow up was cumbersome. As a result, the progress and adherence to plans was not evident, as the status of SIPs were not reported or tracked consistently at every school in the district. When new leadership took over the helm, they expected more consistent, high-level tracking of SIPs, and instituted the full project management discipline to do that. Also, external stakeholders were interested to track the progress of lower schools performing throughout the entire school year.

Solution

DPS wanted a methodology and not just the tool, so the first step for leadership was to develop a Plan Management Methodology that the tool could be based on. After researching several project management tools, DPS chose to implement BrightWork. While implementing BrightWork, the system was customized to meet the requirements of the methodology, creating a true “Plan Management System”.

There was a strong emphasis on customer requirements during this deployment. A lot of effort was made to ensure the tool was not too “business” focused, but rather education focused, using educational terminology and ideas while still staying true to the project management discipline. It was important from the start that school principals saw BrightWork as an enhancement to their work that they could embrace as a value-add, rather than just extra work they had to do because leadership wanted more up-to-date status.

Now, with a fully customized BrightWork environment, school principals are able to log in and log out and track their plan without a lot of effort. They have a Plan Checklist which maps to the methodology so principals can easily mark a task complete once it is finished. The dashboards are designed to map to the methodology as well, with a section to Define and Plan the work and another section to Monitor and Control the plan. As the principals were trained on the plan management methodology, the BrightWork screens and forms were configured to follow that process. With customized forms in the BrightWork environment, principals can set goals and track the plans’ progress. Once goals are set, principals can assign tasks and see the project schedule in a list or Gantt view. As the data is updated, principals and leadership can view a “snapshot” report which shows whether the goals are on schedule, delayed, or off-track, allowing them to know where to focus their attention.

There has been great adoption of the system among the principals and stakeholders are pleased that they can use the tool to oversee SIPs and provide feedback to the plan. The benefit of this system is that as principals keep their plans updated they know exactly what tasks in their plan require attention. For the district leadership, BrightWork enables the visibility to keep track of all SIPs at a high level, across the entire school district.

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