Preparing Through

Partnership

Leon Smith (Semestry Ltd)Szilvia Zsoldos (Hotelschool The Hague)

• 2300 students=2300 student sets• 2 campuses, 2 intakes per year• 400 course offers per year• 30000 scheduled activities per year• 250 staff• 2,1 FTE timetablers

Who are we?

Hotelschool The Hague is a small but ambitious institution, specialized in Hotel Management. Our unique character has been rewarded by the NVAO with 2 special feature: ‘international’ and ‘small scale intensive education’

Who are we?

• Catering for (yet unknown) curriculum changes• Continuous dialog on schedule vs personal

agenda (of non-teaching activities)• Growth while maintaining personal character• Lean ICT

Challenges of the future:

• Supplier of scheduling software to the education market• Founded in 2013, brought to market June 2015• Pure cloud solution• Mission: deliver a better, simpler yet richer scheduling

and resource management solution to universities and colleges globally

• Philosophy: Agility in everything• Simplify the complex to make it more accessible and

applicable

Who are we?

How come we are co-operating?

• Common goal: contribute to the best possible education

• Users are the experts, so only by direct engagement between suppliers and users can the best solutions be delivered

• Based on existing relationships: Mutual trust based on positive past experiences

• Win-win regardless of the commercial outcome – we all learn through collaboration and preparing for the future

• Software that is designed with the client requirements at its heart• Responsive design and support =

• Better software• Satisfied customers• Satisfied supplier

• Build and enhance relationships with existing and prospective partners:• In Principo consulting• Eveoh• SIMAC• CACI/Osiris

What’s in it for me?

TermTime

Financieel

ELO

...CRM

Why Hotelschool The Hague?

• Small school – quick to adapt• Small, engaged team of timetablers – quick to respond• Different from the UK education system - learning

opportunities • 4 blocks instead of whole year courses• course setup different per week• many lecturers within a course• 100% manual scheduling• personal schedule for students• high contact hours

• HTH challenges representative for many other institutions, not just in the Netherlands

• Software that fits our needs/requirements• Helps to find out our requirements• Better solutions to our problems• No burden of technical application management• Less requirements for the client device

-> more mobility for users

What’s in it for me?

How does it work?

Not like this

• Iterative process• Listen – learn – deliver – listen – learn...

• Agile-like, common sense and customer focus are leading

• Regular communication on operational level (Skype, face-to-face)

• Praxis – theoretically great systems are often not great in practice – the theory is tested, changed and improved by real world experience

• Own data in test database

How does it work?

1. Manual scheduling enhancements

• Configurable ‘sticky’ manual/auto scheduling mode

• Enhanced constraint reporting (schedule view and move view)

• Coming soon: click-through for objects to easily navigate pages with pre-applied filters (including ‘show in schedule’) – May be implemented in 6.0

How does it work?examples

Configurable ‘sticky’ manual/auto scheduling mode

Sticky Manual and

Auto schedule buttons

set default behaviour

when selecting an

activity, resulting in a

single click action for

manual scheduling on

a week by week basis.

Enhanced constraint reporting (schedule view and move view)

All activities other

than the one

selected are faded

out slightly to give

clearer view of the

selected activity

being

scheduled/moved.

Enhanced constraint reporting (schedule view and move view)

Multiple times can be

investigated for

finding a scheduling

solution, giving users

details of potential

issues for these prior

to committing to a

selected slot.

2. Scheduling per week

• Filter schedule view by weeks of selected activity

• View schedules on a week by week basis (with step through of weeks)

• Show activity weeks in activity list

•  Coming soon: Sequencing/scheduling of activities across weeks (with transposed week patterns)

How does it work?examples

The ‘Auto Weeks’

option allows the user

to automatically filter

the schedule

displayed weeks

based on the week

range of the selected

activity

Filter schedule view by weeks of selected activity

Schedule page now

displays the activity

type and week range,

with customisable

field details which are

remembered for each

user on each device

being used

Show activity weeks in activity list

3. Staff workload 

• Staff and student hours reporting

• Contact hours for staff

• Record activities as not requiring a scheduled day or time, for contract hours obligations (staff and students)

How does it work?examples

Staff contract delivery hours (plus any adjustment to these), and working weeks can be entered for staff workload planning purposes.

The staff list calculates total time delivered against each activity type, along with total hours, and weighted hours. Totals are compared to expected delivery hours, and the difference (delta) presented.

Staff hours can be investigated on a week by week basis (using the working weeks specified) to see if staff are over or under delivering within those weeks.

Experience so far

• Fast: our feedback has been picked up within weeks

• Clear communication on when you can expect a new feature

• Background in scheduling: clear understanding of each other

• Hearing the problem behind the requested solution, providing alternatives

• Better reporting without extra reporting system and reporting skills

• Better bulk editing/uploading data

• Takes a lot of time to get used to something new

Future challenges for the partnership

Growth: how to manage requests from a large user group?

How to be sure the product is good enough?

Thank you for listening!