Highlights
- Improved data quality with data accessible in one easy location.
- Highlighted students who require additional support at an early age.
- Efficient and cohesive outcomes with Mantel Group’s ‘one team’ way of working.
- Transformed approach to solving business problems for Education Department.
The Problem
Education staff faced significant challenges in providing the best educational experience for their students. Staff encountered several issues, including the inability to accurately identify where their students were in their educational journey and high mobility between communities, meaning staff often didn’t know which students they had in their classroom.
Student data was scattered across more than ten systems, which resulted in a lack of a single source of truth and low data quality. Accessing data from multiple systems to obtain a comprehensive view of a single student was an onerous and time consuming task, leading to the existence of different versions of the truth and requiring high levels of effort.
The Opportunity
The Education Department recognised the need for a more comprehensive solution to enable staff to access their students’ information in one central location. They engaged Mantel Group to design and build a reporting and analytics platform that addresses this requirement, enabling consistent performance monitoring and identification of learning gaps and support requirements at an early age.
The Solution
The first release of the platform prioritised the need for staff to obtain a holistic view of their students’ educational journey, providing a reporting and analytics platform to staff (totalling 3,500+ users). The platform was built using SQL Server and Microsoft Power BI and is deployed within a web environment (Intranet).
Mantel Group has since provided ongoing support to the Education Department, evolving the platform to incorporate school and operational information to provide further support staff and schools.
The benefits of this platform include:
- Access to information: Staff access to information (i.e. attendance, performance, behaviour, achievement) at a student, class, year and school level.
- Performance monitoring: Visibility of the performance and quality outcomes across the whole education services. As a result, trends and risk factors can be easily identified, leading to improved decision-making at the school and classroom level.
- Drill down to transactional detail: A modern ‘in-memory’ reporting architecture that allows users to drill through to the detail, rather than running static aggregated reports
Our Approach
Our approach to creating the reporting and analytics web portal platform was centred around collaboration between our Mantel Group teams and the State Education Department. We worked closely together as one team, utilising design thinking and agile approaches to transform the department’s approach to solving business problems.
Throughout the engagement, we applied design thinking to understand the “why” and identify user needs, primary pain points, ideate and test solutions, and iterate on the solution based on feedback and technical feasibility. We developed the backend solution to bring necessary data into the platform and created the frontend web portal to surface interactive dashboards.
To ensure the platform was developed efficiently, we implemented DevOps to improve the development lifecycle.
We provided hands-on training to department staff in order to upskill them in data transformation using SQL, data modelling, web development, DevOps, design thinking, agile, and scrum methodologies. This collaborative approach allowed us to deliver a solution that met the needs of the department and provided a lasting impact.
