When a school district commits to a new technology deployment, they are committing to spending:
- Money
- Time
- Building-up good will
When these deployments go bad, they are often hard to recover from. Don’t believe me? Ask the Los Angeles United School District.
Let’s look at at the top five ways that school districts mess up their deployments, and how to avoid these issues.
1) Lack of leadership
This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who follows me. If the librarian or technology teacher is the 
one pushing for the deployment, then it’s doomed for failure. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Deployments are never perfect.
Issues will arise that you didn’t plan for. When roadblocks appear, it takes strong leadership at the top of the school to push past them.
2) Underspending on infrastructure
Wi-Fi,switches, and cabling are not exciting purchases. They usually don’t write about them in the newspaper. Buying 50,000 iPads is a lot more fun to talk about and promote.
Unless you are buying LTE iPads for every student, you’ve got to have a network to allow them to communicate to the internet. Don’t neglect the Wi-Fi site survey. Just throwing access points in random locations isn’t going to lead to a successful rollout.
Take the time to analyze your network (or perhaps pay someone else to do it). If you need to update some of your cabling, take the time and resources to do that.
In the long run, you’d be better off to delay your iPad rollout by a year if it allowed you to build up your infrastructure.
3) Not enough parent communication
You cannot over-communicate to parents when it comes to your technology plans. Keep them in the 
loop at every step of the way. It would be wise to have a dedicated place on your website with an FAQ. You should also list the contact information of the DRI (directly responsible individual) for your deployment.
At the end of the day, who is the person that is going to connect the glue? Schedule parent workshops/lectures where you can take questions, talk about your goals, and work through problems. It’s better to deal with issues on the front end rather than when the devices are already rolled out.
4) Underspending on human resources
Do you have the staff in house to manage a deployment? If not, that is step 1.
You need a DRI who’s responsibility is to make it work. You need someone who isn’t doing it part time. You are spending potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on a deployment, and if you aren’t investing in your human resources, you are setting yourself up for failure. If you do have someone in house, make sure to invest in their training.
Are you rolling out a Wi-Fi network where you didn’t have one before? Make sure your in house folks get to go to the training classes provided. Don’t expect them to understand completely new concepts and technologies without helping them along the way.
You’d never roll out new curriculum without providing training to your teachers, so don’t expect your technology folks to do it.
5) Not having goals
You need to be able to answer the why question.
Why are you spending this much money? Why is this important? You will be asked these questions, so you need to be ready.
Goals should drive your decisions. We funnel everything through the question: Is this the best thing for our school and our students? As we answer that question, we determine the how.
This helps us stay on track with our strategic plan.
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