How my role, our software and the market have evolved – Ian Adams

With over 20 years at WCBS, Ian Adams brings his vast experience and in-depth knowledge of school requirements to the Academic Team

How it started:

My very first role at WCBS was as Marketing Assistant which turned into “Marketing to cover maternity leave”.

Back in those days I was dealing with selling add-on modules for our finance software, sourcing peripherals such as printers and PCs for our customers to purchase, plus the occasional onsite job helping out our techies, including one time climbing through roof eaves at a school installing CAT5 cable to get a network up and running!

It used to be about turnkey solutions across multiple companies, to supply all their software requirements.

I spent my time in HK implementing HUB in Asian schools. Due to time zones it was sensible to also move into support and sales roles. At the time air travel was cheap by comparison so it made sense for me to get involved. Once, for example, I had a trip organised to Jakarta and Surabaya on Java and a school on Bali reached out. At £30 return and accommodation even less, it seemed silly not to go… the only downside was the seven hour wait for return flight spent in a rather hedonistic bar whilst still in my business suit. The temptation was to roll up the trouser legs in an attempt to look and at least feel cooler…

How it’s going:

As software has evolved and requirements developed it’s now about partnering with the best suppliers for specialist kit to offer an overall best of breed solution.

There has been such a natural evolution at WCBS and I’m really enjoying being part of it. The development of our HUB suite of products at just the right time to offer schools in the UK and around the world the technologically advanced tools to do their jobs.

It has enabled me to use the 20+ years’ experience I’ve had thanks to WCBS and my own goals, to merge with developing the right products in what has to be a cloud native world in our sector, just like the rest of the tech industry.

The way we develop our software is changing

We’re moving from a waterfall approach to development, to an agile one, constantly improving, instead of a specific start and finish. It means our users are rarely interrupted when new releases occur. We get fast feedback and can respond to change, and it brings our users along on the journey.

My knowledge base of what schools want grows every day, I can detect all the common threads, and make sure we’re covering these, and then enabling schools’ bespoke requirements, making sure there is a divide between market driven and school requirements in specs. But so often nowadays now it’s not as important that I know what schools need, but instead (thanks to a more agile approach) we can ask what schools require, or what they think of our most recent changes, and hear it from them directly.

The beauty of HUB is that schools have much more control over the products, so that as circumstances change and roles change, the software will grow and adapt with them. The individualised nuances of each school can be adapted in the set up of the solution, and the more generalised requirements can be built upon from the start and throughout. This means HUBmis works around each school’s pedagogical framework, because all too often we hear that it’s the other way around.

It’s not just the software that has changed, but the people who use it too

I’ve witnessed the changing roles in schools. Traditionally an IT Manager would be hired to look after hardware and software needs, or a Senior Academic Leader whose first priority was probably teaching, appointed to oversee tech needs, so the software evaluation and maintenance slipped down the daily task list. Now resources are dedicated to a specialist in data application.

I have been very much involved with our early adopters getting first-hand information on how things are working and what sort of enhancements we can make. They are helping to shape the solutions to work better for schools. In my consultancy days discussions were very different according to the role. The decision makers in a school defined the policy, the administrators had to understand the product, to assess whether it will do the job required. The end user needed to have a product they could use as simply as possible to give them a trouble free work day, so had to be trained properly, not necessarily knowing the big picture.

Now, I’m focussed on talking to the Data Specialist plus the Senior leadership team, the end user doesn’t need to be trained because the software is so intuitive. They don’t have to remember how to do everything, just that it can. And as releases are so incremental, they can take on board new functionality piece by piece.