Secondary - Roles & Responsibilities

Your Arbor Project Manager will be your main contact and will be responsible for guiding you through your implementation onto Arbor. Their responsibilities include planning, monitoring and reporting back to you on the status of the implementation. 

They will do this in the following ways:

• Discovery Session: Designed to understand your school, objectives and drivers for change. The goal of the Discovery Session is so that your Project Manager can plan your implementation around your requirements. 
• Weekly Status Calls: With so many moving parts to a whole school implementation, these Status calls are a perfect opportunity to touch base with your Project Manager so you can keep track of where you are up to on your implementation journey. 
• Project Reviews: These reviews are a great chance to review the progress of your project to date as well as to make sure Arbor continues to be aligned with your school’s objectives.

Your Project Manager will be with you throughout the lifecycle of your implementation and will assist you in the following areas:

• Planning your strategic rollout of Arbor by producing an implementation plan based on your objectives
• Planning and coordinating a training program to ensure your staff are confident with how to use Arbor. 
• Managing the end to end migration of data from your previous MIS. 
• Identifying and controlling any risks associated with the implementation.
• Controlling any change of priorities and scope.
• Reporting back on the status of your implementation.

Arbor’s Project Managers are PRINCE2 certified. This is an international best practice standard to ensure your project is controlled in a common, consistent approach. We won’t bore you with the details but speak to your project manager about how PRINCE2 will help to ensure you are more successful on Arbor.

Your Account Manager holds a commercial relationship with the school. You might not see them as much during your implementation but they are responsible for the following:

• Ongoing contact once your Implementation is complete. They will become your main contact after a ‘handover’ from your Project Manager at your final Project Review.
• Looks after your commercial relationship and can help you with any questions relating to your contract. 
• Help you when you need to purchase additional training or services. 
• After your implementation, they will check in with you termly to ensure that you continue to be successful on Arbor. 
• Keeps you up to date with any new developments/Arbor Events and news.

It is not uncommon for your Account Manager to join Project Reviews or Status Calls. This is to ensure that Arbor continues to be aligned with your school’s needs/requirements.

The school’s main point of contact with Arbor during the implementation. Arbor’s Project Manager will organise all aspects of the implementation through the school’s Project Lead and their responsibilities include:

• Installing a team across the school to drive success.
• Understanding the school’s objectives and working with your Arbor Project Manager to ensure that the project is aligned with these objectives. 
• Coordinating the training program and ensuring that the correct teams are trained on Arbor. 
• Working closely with the Arbor Project Manager to identify risks and ensuring the correct mitigation is followed. 
• Identifying and change in scope or priorities and notifying your Arbor Project Manager. 
• Planning and coordinating a training program to ensure your staff are confident with how to use Arbor. 
• Managing the end to end migration of your school’s data and ensuring the data has been checked before Go Live. 
• Reporting back on the status of your implementation to the wider school team.

The Project Lead should be someone who has a good knowledge of the school’s processes, workflows and people. 

An ‘Executive Sponsor’ is a key requirement for success within the school. The Executive Sponsors responsibilities include:

• Ensures that the project’s goals are aligned with the school’s overall vision/strategy.
• Set/clarify and align expectations. What does success look like at the school?
• Provide resources to ensure the school’s project remains on track. 
• Drives change and overcomes resistance across the school by communicating the benefits that a new MIS will bring to the school.

The Executive Sponsor and Project Lead should not be the same person. Before you begin your implementation onto Arbor it is important that the Project Lead and Executive Sponsor meet to set their expectations. What does success on Arbor look like and what resources does the Project Lead have to meet these requirements?

The Project Lead and Executive Sponsor should meet regularly and be able to talk candidly about any blockers to change within the school or any resistance.

The Executive Sponsor will not be involved in the day to day running of the implementation. This will be the responsibility of the Project Lead. They should join the Project Reviews as this will be where the Arbor Project Manager reviews the project to date, and we can ensure that we are all aligned to the same objectives. 

The Executive Sponsor is usually the Head Teacher or a member of the Senior Leadership Team. 

This will be someone who will be familiar with all the IT systems across the school. Their responsibilities will include:

• Producing the data migration backups and sending them to Arbor.
• Contacting any third-party applications that you wish to continue using on Arbor and notifying them of the change.
• Ensuring that any third-party applications are set up on Arbor for Day 1. 

Moving your whole school to a new MIS is a complex change programme with lots of moving parts. It is important that you install people across your organisation that can help you drive this change. These people are known as ‘Arbor Champions’.

The responsibilities of the Arbor Champions will be to:

• Help ‘champion’ the benefits of Arbor across the teams.
• Identify and control any resistance to change across their areas of responsibility.
• They will become the experts in their Area. They will be able to support their wider team with any ‘how do I’ type questions.
• Attend any training sessions relating to their areas of responsibility. 
• Ensure the data that has been migrated is correct in their area of responsibility and that they will be able to carry out their duties once Live on Arbor.
• Any specific setup/configuration tasks relating to their area of responsibility.
• Help to deliver the schools change plan.

A successful Arbor Champion is someone who is a great communicator who is able to share their knowledge and a representative of a stakeholder group (such as Exams/Assessments/Behaviour etc).

The School’s Project Lead should meet with the Arbor Champions once the main objectives have been set and then work with them to understand how these benefits can be translated into their areas. If a school objective is to save time, The Arbor Champions should be able to communicate exactly how Arbor will save time in their area.