Shift Left

I have spent a significant part of this week working on computer. Last Summer, as soon as I came aboard, a problem presented itself: the teacher education database run on Helix had to be replaced. The company that supports it went bankrupt; the program cannot be run on any PC and on new Mac operating system. The database was developed over some 15 years, and contains thousands of records, dozens of screens, reports, and other features. The dilemma we faced was that a new commercial product that would do the same thing costs about $30,000, plus it would require significant annual maintenance fee. The other option was to develop our own database, but we have neither expertise, nor resources to do so.

The Helix is something faculty do not deal with at all: tracking student admissions to PTEP’s, their compliance with fingerprinting, TB testing, and other State requirements, keeping track of their admission to PTEP status, making sure they took all prerequisite courses before proceeding to the next level, etc. Then we place students for their multiple field experiences, and finally, recommend them for licensure. I have to admit, it took me a couple of months just to figure out what is it we do here in STE office. Again, this is something faculty do not necessarily know or involved in, and in a university, what does not concern faculty directly tends to move to background. Our dedicated staff plugs away at all this ever-more complicated processes, without much attention or appreciation of their work. However, all these tasks are essential for the School’s operations, and I had no choice but to try to figure out a solution.

Eugene, the Dean was actually supportive, although he blinked when he heard the amount we are likely to need to buy the new commercial product. “If you really needed, we can find the money,” he said. Then we explored several competing providers, and met with one of them to discuss a possible deal. That is when I got anxious. First, we would be buying a product that does not exactly fit our needs. Then, in order to modify it, we would have to have endless meetings with providers. You see, with the techies, you have to explain in detail what you want, and they will do it for you. But figuring out what you want is well over half of the solution, so you pay them for the work you did. And finally, the new system they were selling to us would be difficult to modify: we’d have to pay them every time we want some change. And who knows if the company will go bust, just like Helix did?

I called for help on our wonderful staff: Karon, Vicky, Marita and Layne, and we brainstormed a solution. What we came up with is an example of the “shift left” strategy, or improvement through radical simplification. Read about the meaning of the expression here. What many people do not realize is that software industry has a vested interest in selling people ever-more complicated, bloated products. I am playing with Office 2007 right now, and boy it is bloated. It has some nice features, and some features no one will ever use, but it is a memory hog I would never pay my own personal money for. Why do they sell us all those monsters? Part of it is explainable with simple lack of imagination, and lack of attention to consumers. However, a bigger part of it has to do with money – in the absence of cheaper alternatives, consumers have to shell out cash for complicated, cumbersome systems. Anyway, I am proud to say, we resisted, and here is our solution:

1. We invented the checkpoint courses – the fake courses in which students will bring whole packages of paperwork, and we will give them credit. Thus, we will be using the existing Registrar’s data base to perform a function that was not initially intended for it. Thanks to the Registrar people for being such good sports and supporting us on this. This took care of more than half of the old Helix functionality, and is going to save us a lot of time on data entry.

2. We bit the bullet, learned Access and developed our own smaller, simpler database. Of course, as the geekiest person in the office, I had to do most of the developing, but the idea is that at least two or three people here would know enough to tweak it when needed: to add or remove a field, to put together another form, etc. Access is unlikely to discontinue; it is a part of the standard Office, and we can always find an expert if we run into difficulties.

3. And finally, we are going to integrate Blackboard’s test feature to collect information from students and then import into our new database. This part is still in development, but I am confident it will work. This will save us more data-entry time.

It is not only that we have saved 30K, plus some 5K annually, but we also were able to simplify and streamline the processes here in the office. One of our staffers jokingly asked, “if you automate everything, will we lose our jobs?” That’s just not the case. Our staff has a lot of expertise and experience, so they will be more closely involved with advising and guiding students through their programs. There is always more work to do; the trick is to replace boring, tedious work with more challenging, more interesting, and more useful work. Of course, in the meanwhile, I am sitting here designing forms, and it is not fun. But I am not complaining, and it is gratifying to see things that you first only imagined actually work.

The “shift left” move is very useful, and not only in software design. Nowadays, we tend to make things more complex, just because we can. We all need to learn to simplify, and to keep it simple.