The Perfect Team - Operations Management
"You get what you put in."
I finished my Operations Management class today at 6 AM and was finally relieved. For two weeks, I have been full of anxiety because of an assignment that I didn't turn in. Tawni Johnson not turning in an assignment, never! The assignment has haunted me every day since. Guess how long it took me to finish it?
20 minutes!!
Twenty minutes because no matter what, all I could do was my best. My best was guaranteed to be sketchy. I knew there was a piece of the assignment that I couldn't complete. I wish I had gotten past the shock of missing the deadline and just finished the assignment.
The good news is that I have a new respect for operations management and the possibilities of what you can do to make your systems streamlined and running at optimal efficiency. It has pushed me to think about needed shifts within some key workstreams I oversee. The one we struggled with the most this semester was early dismissal. After several distraught parents and frustrated staff, we identified the bottlenecks in our process. While I wish we had the capacity to collect data, still, anecdotally, the following bottlenecks and solutions were identified:
- Reduced front office operations staffing to support the process
- One operations team member supports in the morning
- One operations team member supports in the evening
- Splitting the duty evened the additional load across all team members
- Teachers not responding to intercom notifications, text messages, or having walkie-talkies on
- Grade Level Chairs are asked to keep their walkie-talkies on throughout the day.
- Middle school students in retrieving phones from the school leader
- This may be a work in progress.
An AI automation tool I would develop would be an app or feature for early dismissal, where parents could notify the school team that they have arrived to pick up their child.
- Parent and student information would sync automatically from an SIS
- Children are mapped to specific team members
- Those team members are notified via push notification on their school-issued device that the parent has arrived to pick up the child.
- [insert school-specific procedure following the notification]
The best part is the level of transparency all staff members have to see the frequency of early pick-ups for particular students, whether it is a pattern of behavior or a once-in-a-while action. Frequent early pick-ups impact students in negative ways. They are typically learning up until the last minute of school, and dismissing them early prevents them from receiving the material taught at the end of the day.
I believe this feature would significantly reduce the time it takes for a student to reach their parent from the arrival time and the number of negative interactions staff have with parents.
I wish I could set up the AnyLogic platform to understand our actual optimal capacity and utilization. While I still don't have the data, I did take some time to think about the perfect staffing structure for a school campus of our size, with the number of students we have, the constraints of our physical footprint, and the demands of the roles. For the work to be sustainable, it should be more evenly distributed among people making similar pay, and each needs support. Here is what I mean:
If a K-8 charter school could generate revenue, I believe this structure would yield high profitability.