Donderdag 16 juni 2016 Parallelsessieronde 1 Titel: Preparing through partnership Spreker: Leon Smith (Semestry Ltd) Szilvia Zsoldos Zaal: Cambridge 25

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

2. • 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’

3. 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:

4. • 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?

5. 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

6. • 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?

7. TermTime
Financieel
ELO
...
CRM

8. 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

9. • 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?

10. How does it work?

11. • 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?

12. 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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

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

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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

24. Future challenges for the partnership
Growth: how to manage
requests from a large user
group?
How to be sure the product
is good enough?

25. Thank you for listening!