Making school easier

SLet's get it straight: Quality management in Swiss schools is part and parcel of everyday school life in many ways. However, the effort to communicate everything to everyone and to bring all documents precisely up to date is enormous.

No wonder: the modern school system is subject to reform efforts that follow one another so closely that their implementation leads to considerable additional work for teaching staff and school administrators.

Problems and fears

An electronic QM system with good document management can help here. But quite a few teachers view such tools with suspicion. Fear of even more work breaks through in an industry that is already worried about ever-increasing bureaucracy and less and less freedom of movement in the exercise of the profession. The most frequently heard argument is that "the students are not getting enough".

The devil is in the details

So the question is: does a controlling system make everyone's job easier? Or is it just a matter of finding out who is doing something wrong? Hans-Peter Kost, head of the Zofingen-based software company IQS AG, likes to put it this way: "It's not about finding mistakes, but avoiding them."

Kost's digital showpiece is IQSoft. This electronic quality management assistant runs in over 1000 Swiss companies and institutions. And after hospitals and public authorities, the BWZ Lyss has now also been using the modular software package for some time - and is one of the first schools to do so.

Electronic quality management as a logical development

For Erich Brunner, Quality Manager at BWZ Lyss, QM via software was a logical step, because his "company" has not only been looking ahead since yesterday. As early as 1999, the BWZ Lyss had itself certified according to ISO 9001, nota bene against great internal resistance and as the very first Bernese educational centre. Other certifications and many audits followed.

However, this did not take the issue of "clean, easily accessible documentation" off the table. That's why Brunner decided to make a qualitative sweeping blow in 2010:

Practical handling of documents

"It was time to update our quality management system. Until then, anyone looking for a document had to know the document number. And as far as paper documentation was concerned, some new documents were borrowed and never returned."

Even the thrice-yearly newsletter with a long list of updated documents was no walk in the park. "That always took a lot of work," Brunner recalls. And it wasn't complete either, as he illustrates with a seemingly innocuous detail: "Look, today we no longer talk about apprentices or apprentice daughters or trainees, but are required by law to talk about learners. Just to change that correctly in all the documents ... it was no longer possible."

Clear requirements

The following criteria were decisive for the evaluation of the desired solution:

• Simple navigation interface for employees
• Keep previous documents as far as possible (Word, Visio, Excel)
• Possibly step-by-step transfer to a new interface (navigation)
• Introductory phases must be possible step by step (modular system)
• Process sequences (e.g. for proofs) should be able to be recorded in the software.
• Search options must be available (full text search if possible)

Presentation convinced - software purchased

To solve his tasks, Erich Brunner tested several software packages in 2011. In the end, he was particularly convinced by IQSoft, not least thanks to the product presentation by IQS AG in Lyss, which impressed even the school computer scientist present - a species that is sceptical about software introductions for good reason. The program was purchased.

However, IQSoft did not go online until 2012. Brunner admits, "We needed much fewer resources than expected. If we had realized this beforehand, we would have started with IQSoft sooner." A valuable statement, because too much respect for the amount of work involved in integrating QM software has caused many a Q manager to wait before introducing it.

Introduction is not a Herculean task

And how big is this effort really? How complicated is the program? How many training sessions were necessary before the launch?

Those who already know IQSoft know: The format of the document does not matter. IQSoft supports existing systems. All original data are still available, but now per

Easy and quick to find

can be analyzed at the click of a mouse. And as far as recording the necessary data records is concerned: "I have a second-year employee who does that. She had it down in five minutes and found everything else she was looking for about the program in the IQSoft manuals. They're good. And the full-text search helps a lot with data updates."

Express Training

IQSoft allows the user to freely design the start interface. Brunner kept it in the style of the school and maps the entire intranet on one page: "The IQSoft interface is intuitive anyway. So I designed a seven-page guide with lots of pictures and did 15 minutes of training with 45 main teachers. That's all the time I got. With the part-time teachers it took 30 minutes. One of them asked me a question. Of course, I then organized another follow-up training for the same people. Two people came."

Fleet use

Since then, data recorded at BWZ Lyss has been retrieved with the document management system via IQSoft. When a document changes, only the people concerned receive an e-mail. And this is done automatically. The tracking (history) is always done. External instructors, mostly professionals, are pleased that they can find everything easily and quickly. And even teachers from outside the industry and the school's principal are thrilled, says the quality manager.

Verifications, process regulations, standards? Everything can be updated and checked at the click of a mouse. Nervous audit preparation phases, commonplace in many places before audits, do not exist in Lyss.

More joy at work

Making school easier thanks to electronic process management. For Erich Brunner, this is absolutely measurable: "Q-work is now fun again". Next, he plans to use the IQSoft module BPM (Business Process Modeling). Thanks to the modular structure of the Zofingen program (you only buy and use what you need), he could take his time with this. But perhaps BPM runs so smoothly right away that - see above - he would regret waiting longer in retrospect.