If you had chosen a new MIS provider and, after migrating, realised that it wasn’t quite what you had hoped, would you have the courage to admit your mistake and change MIS again?
Looking around at the various MIS providers’ websites, we recently came across a case study on the Bromcom site that made us take a second look…
A Multi Academy Trust, consisting of a large secondary school along with three primary schools, made the decision to change their legacy on-premises MIS in 2022 and move to a cloud-based solution.
Having selected a new MIS provider they duly migrated to it – yet just a year later, in June 2023, the Trust took the very difficult decision to move MIS yet again, stating that they felt that the MIS they had previously migrated to simply did not meet their schools’ needs.
Changing the MIS provider for all four schools TWICE in two years seemed pretty extreme to us so we investigated further.
The full case study can be found at https://bromcom.com/case-study/corinium. Whilst this is, obviously, written from a Bromcom perspective, it does make interesting reading.
What on earth could make a Multi Academy trust who had:
- researched the MIS market
- selected a new provider that appeared to meet their requirements
- gone on to migrate their schools across to the new platform
then take the decision that they had made a mistake and go through the whole process once more?
Changing a school’s MIS is not a minor decision. It takes a lot of time and effort to undertake the project – even more so for a Trust of four schools. To then accept that you have made an error and decide to change MIS again in order to fix that error says a great deal about the strength of the Trust senior team. Not many would ‘take it on the chin’ by accepting responsibility for their mistake and go through the pain of moving MIS in order to get the system that they want to meet their needs.
Have a read of the case study yourselves and, whilst doing so, ask yourself these questions:
‘If I had made the same decision initially, would I have the courage to accept that I had made a mistake?’
‘If I did accept the mistake, would I have the strength to revise that decision and move provider for a second time?’
‘If so, how would I gain the buy in for this from my senior teams across the Trust?’
We are not sure if we would have had the commitment to move MIS twice in two years – would you?
