Network Audit?

[mavhc]

Step 1: go to governors, Step 2: go to government

[jmak]

Step 1: go to governors, Step 2: go to government

Step 0.5: prepare your CV

 

Not because I think you're going to get sacked, but you might be better off somewhere that the value of what you do is understood.

[forkies]

I am not going to go over what others have said about in house as I assume you have already tried this route and hence why you are looking for an external audit.

 

I am not close so cannot recommend a company however I would recommend having a chat with your Business Manager who may be able to chat with other BMs at local schools and have one of their IT Managers come over and have a look at the setup, hardware and general configuration and give some advise at little cost if any.

 

The reason I would do this, is they would be in a similar position with any local authority restrictions, budget wise of the local area and most importantly they are not a company who are going to try and sell you kit which you don’t require or is over specified and overpriced in their recommendations.

[strawberry]

I think you need to build bonds in school. You've not said anything quantifiable. You might do better to engage more. Maybe ask your NM to complete a SWOT analysis to see what he thinks the issues are and what the priorities are. You might find things like running backups on a shoestring budget are getting in the way of fast access to youtube.

[Tefters]

According to another post you made not long ago you have changed ISP recently and it’s not running as well as hoped.

 

Putting these 2 posts together it would seem it was possibly your choice to move to said ISP and because the service has dive bombed it’s not looking great for you?

Possibly more reliance on internet connectivity then you thought/budgeted for and now everything is grinding to a halt due to this?

 

It would help to have ALL the details which your post really has none. Your second post has more information then this but even that is scarce.

[mrblueish]

The NM has full control of the infrastructure, we aren’t a MAT and the LA has no influence over it

[Bionic]

The NM has full control of the infrastructure, we aren’t a MAT and the LA has no influence over it

 

Ok, I assume that you have sat down with the IT support staff and discussed the issues you are having? Was it mutually agreed to have a 3rd party come in to conduct an audit with the aim of helping resolve the issues?

[Fazza]

Sounds like you need to build your relationship with the NM you manage so you can talk to them about the issues and what you can do to improve them rather than spending upwards of £800 per day for a network audit (which would take several days to complete) and if you have that sort of money you could buy more/better network switches, cabling etc.

[mrblueish]

The NM is running an expensive resource and has the biggest budget in the school, yet has no auditing process to judge the quality of the service that is provided, a self assessment is not adequate, because a self assessment does not identify your own blind spots. I would think a confident NM would welcome outside auditing and view it as a development opportunity rather than a threat, and those who do view it as a threat, I would ask them why they think they are above professional accountability? Or would they rather be held accountable by a bunch of non techie teachers?

 

An audit is something we are considering because we feel that the NM needs support to identify the strengths and the weaknesses of the network. I don't view it as a punitive tool, rather as a way of mapping how the things can be improved and to give us a basis of an improvement plan to ensure we get value for money in a time when budgets are shrinking.

[strawberry]

buy more/better network switches, cabling etc.

 

Assuming infrastructure is the issue. More likely to be a dodgy photocopier, Teachers unable to access dailymotion, The PE staff not able to get wireless at the edge of the sports field, the art teacher unable to teach without the latest mac and Adobe suite, the English teacher not happy to walk 10 metres to the MFD to collect their prints, the school secretary complaining that Gmail bamboozles her and the 80 year old primary teacher arguing that paper register is all she needs.

[atcoates]

I'm NM of eight schools and over the years we have had a few audits done by external companies and it's actually been quite useful. In most cases it's backed up what I've been telling the school for years. Teachers are inspected and observed all of the time so asking the same of the NM doesn't seem too much of a problem to me. Ultimately I'm an employee of the school and if I'm not doing my job, they want to know about it.

 

I've also visited a few other schools to give help and advice etc.

Edited April 26, 2018 by atcoates

[strawberry]

The NM is running an expensive resource and has the biggest budget in the school, yet has no auditing process to judge the quality of the service that is provided, a self assessment is not adequate, because a self assessment does not identify your own blind spots. I would think a confident NM would welcome outside auditing and view it as a development opportunity rather than a threat, and those who do view it as a threat, I would ask them why they think they are above professional accountability? Or would they rather be held accountable by a bunch of non techie teachers?

 

An audit is something we are considering because we feel that the NM needs support to identify the strengths and the weaknesses of the network. I don't view it as a punitive tool, rather as a way of mapping how the things can be improved and to give us a basis of an improvement plan to ensure we get value for money in a time when budgets are shrinking.

 

And how do you feel about OFSTED?. Do you feel they help you with the massive amount of paperwork you need to do?. Do they give you quality time with the students?. Do they help you when you submit a budget request for new materials. I assume you welcome the school business manager questioning you about your teaching and why more of your students aren't getting better results?.

[Boredguy]

The NM is running an expensive resource and has the biggest budget in the school, yet has no auditing process to judge the quality of the service that is provided, a self assessment is not adequate, because a self assessment does not identify your own blind spots. I would think a confident NM would welcome outside auditing and view it as a development opportunity rather than a threat, and those who do view it as a threat, I would ask them why they think they are above professional accountability? Or would they rather be held accountable by a bunch of non techie teachers?

 

An audit is something we are considering because we feel that the NM needs support to identify the strengths and the weaknesses of the network. I don't view it as a punitive tool, rather as a way of mapping how the things can be improved and to give us a basis of an improvement plan to ensure we get value for money in a time when budgets are shrinking.

 

An alternative would be to try and foster relations at another school and ask your NM and their NM to meet at each site to see how their system is setup and discuss it instead of an expensive audit.

I've had several local schools come over previously (and visited some schools the other side of the country before) and every time we've found either something they were doing that was better or vice versa. Sometimes an query from a peer is easier to take on board.

[Bionic]

An alternative would be to try and foster relations at another school and ask your NM and their NM to meet at each site to see how their system is setup and discuss it instead of an expensive audit.

I've had several local schools come over previously (and visited some schools the other side of the country before) and every time we've found either something they were doing that was better or vice versa. Sometimes an query from a peer is easier to take on board.

 

 

This is a good bit of advice and one that I would encourage you to follow if possible. Network audits can be very expensive, and you've already stated that "...budgets are shrinking...".

 

If you start spending lots of money on network audits which highlight issues but don't actually fix the issues, the school governors will rightly start asking questions. I'm sure there will be a lot of free expertise in local schools who would be happy to work in partnership for the benefit of both parties.

[ITGURU]

Always a good idea to get contact with Peers/Network Managers at other school. Since becoming a MAT I am now carrying out an IT Assessment Report of another school on the network to feed back on best practices, what needs to be changed/upgraded etc.

We do everything in-house to save as much money as possible.

[mrblueish]

And how do you feel about OFSTED?. Do you feel they help you with the massive amount of paperwork you need to do?. Do they give you quality time with the students?. Do they help you when you submit a budget request for new materials. I assume you welcome the school business manager questioning you about your teaching and why more of your students aren't getting better results?.

 

I have no problem with being audited or checked by another teacher, I should be judged by them to see how effective I am at my job, as an aside my school also uses student voice to get another view of how a teacher delivers lessons and I welcome that because they are my customers. As I said a confident professional should welcome being auditied by others in the same profession and if you don’t welcome it, I will question how effective you are at your job.

 

As for your comment about the school manager questioning me about my teaching and results, I avoid that by being open to review by other teaching professionals.

[mrblueish]

I'm NM of eight schools and over the years we have had a few audits done by external companies and it's actually been quite useful. In most cases it's backed up what I've been telling the school for years. Teachers are inspected and observed all of the time so asking the same of the NM doesn't seem too much of a problem to me. Ultimately I'm an employee of the school and if I'm not doing my job, they want to know about it.

 

I've also visited a few other schools to give help and advice etc.

 

I wish more had an open attitude like this!

[IT_Man_Dan]

This....

 

And how do you feel about OFSTED?. Do you feel they help you with the massive amount of paperwork you need to do?. Do they give you quality time with the students?. Do they help you when you submit a budget request for new materials. I assume you welcome the school business manager questioning you about your teaching and why more of your students aren't getting better results?.

 

Without knowing more details it sounds a bit confrontational towards the NM.

Anyone should be fine with being observed by a professional in the same field but it opens it up for confrontation when someone not in the same field starts comparing systems to other systems etc.

 

I would recommend an audit from an outside professional but also be very careful not to offend the NM.

If on the other hand the attitude of the NM stinks then that's another issue to be addressed entirely.

 

Edited April 26, 2018 by IT_Man_Dan

[synaesthesia]

@mrblueish I suspect the reason you were jumped on in the manner you were, is that without any reference to your team's skills or knowledge, or even backing them up at all, you immediately pointed out that problems are instantly blamed on an outside provider. That doesn't come across well at all from anyone's point of view. For many, this is likely where an assumption is born; the assumption that perhaps the relation between yourself/the school and the IT team isn't as good as perhaps it should be and that there isn't good communication back and forth. Of course from there, having someone ask for an "audit" to be carried out looks purely to be as a result of a lack of trust. There must be trust there for teamwork to work.

 

This is why you need to sit down with that team and ask what THEY think the weaknesses are; they are in the best possible place to make that judgement. Make it clear you want to help and make sure they don't see this as a reason to distrust you. No NM should feel put out of place unless they have a reason to. Assuming you're their line manager, it's then your job to make sure they remain happy IF that's what is needed. If it turns out staffing is the problem then naturally you can deal with that in due course, but until those weaknesses are identified whether internally, by an external auditor, or even by counterparts at another school it's best to remain a little more tight-lipped about some things.

[DJ-1701]

As you see from others (I count at least 4) review or meetings with other school IT would be more professional, and in line with your practices with teachers and be an infinitely more cost effect measure, mutually beneficial.

 

I would say that hearing your school budget is largely focused on IT is a VERY welcome change , most of use have to deal with aging equipment with no funding, and still people can't understand why things are slow or don't work. Then, out of the blue with no discussion receive iPads as 'they are wonderful in X school', and having to try and get them working on sub-standard infrastructure, where the money should have been spent.

[Scrumpy]

Agree with others about the sensitive approach required for this, but if you still feel the need for an external audit, try BT Lancashire. They came in at my request (I'm the IT Tech) as when I started at my school there was no network/infrastructure documentation, some switches still had the old IP scheme configured (but still worked) and generally the network side of things was a bit of a mess. Although it mostly worked, nearly all equipment was long out of warranty, more suitable for home/small business use, and in need of upgrading.

 

The audit basically made recommendations, which pretty much fell in line with what I thought, but was a worthwhile exercise for me being fairly new to the school and a touch behind on current network best practice/hardware recommendations. Bt Lancs didn't charge for the audit (not sure if they meant to) but cost might be approx £180 if they do.

[mavhc]

If you can't have a proper conversation with your NM, then nothing else will help, what have you done to try to do that that's failed so far?

[p858snake]

Hi

 

This is my first post, so please forgive me if this is in the wrong forum.

 

I'm a teacher at a high school and I have the responsibility of managing the IT Support team at the school, this includes the network manager and his support staff. We seem to have many issues in school that aren't resolved quickly and it seems it takes a lot of time to get to a solution for a problem. Whenever a problem occurs, the first instance is the network team blaming an outside agency (cashless service provider, ISP etc. Compared to my last school the IT infrastructure seems creaky and unreliable.

 

I'm looking to resolve this and to this end would like a recommendation of an organisation who could do a network audit for the school, identifying what (if any) weaknesses the network has and how they can be resolved. Any support you can give would be appreciated. We are a school in Lancashire

 

As the TL for the NW are you discussing these issues within your weekly/fortnightly/monthly supervision sessions?

 

How are you monitoring perceived issues with service delivery? Vague or back handed comments? tracked in a ticketing system?

 

What are you incident post mortem documentation like?

[Lonix]

Hi

 

This is my first post, so please forgive me if this is in the wrong forum.

 

I'm a teacher at a high school and I have the responsibility of managing the IT Support team at the school, this includes the network manager and his support staff. We seem to have many issues in school that aren't resolved quickly and it seems it takes a lot of time to get to a solution for a problem. Whenever a problem occurs, the first instance is the network team blaming an outside agency (cashless service provider, ISP etc. Compared to my last school the IT infrastructure seems creaky and unreliable.

 

I'm looking to resolve this and to this end would like a recommendation of an organisation who could do a network audit for the school, identifying what (if any) weaknesses the network has and how they can be resolved. Any support you can give would be appreciated. We are a school in Lancashire

 

Sometimes there are multiple factors why problems always occur. Having been at different schools there seems to be a long list of reasons why.

 

-IT team members are not always up to scratch, we are not all great at our jobs, right for the positions, maybe not happy in our current role or personal lives could be impacting our day to day job.

-No Money, you can't have IT with no expenditure.

-No Time, to permanently resolve issues you need more than 5 minutes.

-No SLT support, if they don't have your back.. you are fighting against the odds.

-Not enough staff

-Old equipment

 

If it's unreliable, try and sit down to work out why.

A full site audit really helps:

how old is all the equipment

what PC/Server operating systems are you on

general state of the classrooms

 

Try and see what the guys are doing daily. Are they resetting 200 passwords a day, doing admin tasks, unjamming printers, spending 1 hour in classes just to show staff/students how to print.

 

If the IT team won't sit and talk to you.... is it your approach to them? are they afraid you are just after shooting them? what was their previous line managers like? or are they simply difficult to work with?

 

If you walk in the door to find 10+ year old equipment, little to no budget, no time to improve systems, failing servers and slow networking (100MB) while still having a large network and IT in every class... that's why you will have a failing system. This is exactly the situation I have found my self in before. Quite often it's the school that wants everything with no cost or would rather go for the new 'pretty' idea every year instead of fixing what gets used daily in the classroom by every teacher.

 

More than welcome to PM me if you'd like further advice.

[AuXDubz]

As you see from others (I count at least 4) review or meetings with other school IT would be more professional, and in line with your practices with teachers and be an infinitely more cost effect measure, mutually beneficial.

 

I would say that hearing your school budget is largely focused on IT is a VERY welcome change , most of use have to deal with aging equipment with no funding, and still people can't understand why things are slow or don't work. Then, out of the blue with no discussion receive iPads as 'they are wonderful in X school', and having to try and get them working on sub-standard infrastructure, where the money should have been spent.

 

1 Up This - "review or meetings with other school IT would be more professional, and in line with your practices with teachers and be an infinitely more cost effect measure, mutually beneficial."