On the first day of work, I was given a project for the summer:
Create a process manual for centralized enrollment within the Early Education department (EED) in the San Francisco Unified School District.
I executed my project through the following steps.
Step 1: Understand the project.
Currently, EED enrollment is done at the school site level. The department wanted to transition enrollments into the central office. Doing so would help the central office to better understand its Early Education students, and it would free up valuable time for school site administrators.
I also had to understand my deliverable. What is a process manual? A step-by-step guide of a process, I soon learned – in this case, the process for central enrollment. It would be used to train the EED central office enrollment clerks.
Step 2: Understand the current process.
First, I had to understand how enrollments work today. For the first two weeks of my internship, I conducted interviews with a number of staff members, from site managers to IT. I found out that Early Education enrollment was much more complicated than I had thought.
Step 3: Create a vision for the centralized process.
I had to define how the enrollment process would look in the central office before I could create a process manual. I identified inefficiencies in the current process and kept the end goals of the project in mind to come up with this vision. When I came up with something I thought would work, I put it into a presentation. I solicited feedback first from my fellow Ed Pioneers intern, and then from my supervisors.
Step 4: Create a process manual.
Now that I had an understanding of what the process would look like, I could create the manual. As I created it, I realized that there were a number of holes in it. For example, what IT system would the central office clerks use? What tools would they use to answer questions from parents? What communication system would they use to communicate with school sites?
Step 5: Create an implementation plan.
An implementation plan was not my original deliverable, but it followed naturally from my process manual. In order for the centralized enrollment to happen, the “holes” in the process manual had to be filled. I wrote down the steps needed to roll out the process and identified the responsible people. I also created a proposal to phase in the process over time.
My project was an eye-opening experience for me. Through my efforts to centralize EED enrollment, I now have a much better understanding of the district’s operations.
