The following are the Roles/Goals, Pains, and Gains for a secondary school Principal in India.
Roles / Goals
- Teacher
- Hiring teacher
- Assess teacher capability
- Form and Execute training plan
- Mentoring
- Textbook selection (map syllabus to book)
- Teacher scheduling & allocation
- Feedback/review cycle (teacher effectiveness)
- Setup & Monitor scoring rubric for assessment
- School admin reports and regulatory compliance
- School performance
Pains
- Admin / Hiring / Training
- Transactional exception management
- Leave of absence
- Admissions
- Student Injuries
- Transport
- Teaching Logistics
- (stationaries, books, papers)
- Event Management
- [budget planning, to event coordination]
- Syllabus coverage
- Board & competitive exam preparation
Gains
- Social recognition of the school
- Student performance
Your challenge is to come up with 3 or 4 hypotheses that would validate our product’s feature set.
Suggested Solution:
- We believe that Principal would welcome Technology as it would ease their pain of managing admin and operational tasks
- We believe that Principal would use a technology platform to mentor and manage performance of Teachers
- We believe that Principal would look for a tool that could improve Learner’s performance
- We believe that Principal would prefer a tool that helps in effective rubrics for assessment
- We believe that Principal would look for Social Recognition of their school
2 Responses
While the solution is simple, its implementation will be tough since the business would not easily sponsor them. While it is a good idea to write all technical debt stories, generally, there will not be any Product Owner who likes to own and accept since the PO comes with business mindset. These kind of work is pushed by external team (not the scrum team). Generally, these is a lack of ownership of these stories and pushed by external teams. I am purposefully, I am not the solution this gap in this comment. Want to hear from others.
I agree Guru. The reason why i mentioned this as a Dilemma for the Engineering manager is do we handle only the low hanging fruits and run with it, or would you work for a harder and more difficult transformation of creation of a working pipeline.
I know one manager I have interacted made the call and felt the next 6 months extremely hard to convince and influence different stakeholders. This is easier to accept while you are doing a transformation.