SIMS > Bromcom

[PICNIC]

We are currently planning a migration from SIMS to Bromcom, does anyone have thoughts on when is the best time to migrate? Bromcom have suggested Easter, take a copy of the data on the first day of the break and then we have a few days of the break left to work on staff and permissions. SMT however would prefer doing it over the summer.

 

What did you do? Did it go well?

 

TIA for any replies.

[dmj]

I'd agree with Bromcom, they have more experience with this than SLT.

There's never a 'good' time, but Summer term is usually a bit less hectic than the beginning of sept, notwithstanding exams.

There's less pressure on the provider as well, so issues will get fixed faster.

[rogerdnixon]

We did this for our secondary's a few years ago and did it either side of Feb half term in groups of 2/3 schools per week. The ones that did it over half term did not have to populate a weeks worth of attendance data retrospectively. Key things to make it as smooth as it can be:

 

Make sure key people fully get onboard with the training - so attendance, exams, data, timetable and so on. People claiming to have done training when they clearly had not caused most issues for us.

If you are a secondary - you will have a test site with your data - so run through what needs to be done to get this ship shape at the point of live site handover.

Make sure the relevant people have access to support day one.

Bring in the extra modules gradually - don't try to do more than the basic MIS and integrations day 1.

 

We did our 20 primaries earlier in the year (from a variety of MISs) and that was late March to a few weeks after Easter.

 

I think September day 1 go live would be brave as that's peak time for everything else. Did a new primary a few weeks ago mid term and it was fine - just be very clear in who needs to do what and when and make sure they do it. Good luck.

[Bromcom_Darren]

We are currently planning a migration from SIMS to Bromcom, does anyone have thoughts on when is the best time to migrate? Bromcom have suggested Easter, take a copy of the data on the first day of the break and then we have a few days of the break left to work on staff and permissions. SMT however would prefer doing it over the summer.

 

What did you do? Did it go well?

 

TIA for any replies.

Good morning,

 

If you would like to engage with some fellow schools who have already embarked on the same journey as you, I can provide you with registration details for the Bromcom Community and you can ask our 8500 members for their pros and cons if that helps.

 

Simply send you email address and school name to [email protected] and we can get you registered.

 

Darren Moody

Community Manager

[KSCSIT]

In the same boat as the OP - There's positive and negatives to both dates so keen to see how others have found this. (Have emailed to sign up to Bromcom community)

[DODICT]

September launch is definitely overrated IMHO - anything you communicate pre summer is forgotten so I'd prefer an Easter go live and get them onboard in that period before the summer with less other competing priorities.

[PICNIC]

Simply send you email address and school name to [email protected] and we can get you registered.

 

Thanks Darren, I have sent details.

[mthomas08]

We migrated from SIMs to Bromcom at Easter if I remember rightly.

 

It gave time for the staff to adapt. It isn't our busiest period - I would absolutely avoid doing this during January and September, they tend to be manic for us and staff.

 

I led the whole thing and helped out the core users and day to day teachers. I pretty much dedicated all day every day to Bromcom to make sure everyone could do their job. Permissions had to be constantly tweaked for most users.

We used the holiday time to make sure all the systems were synced with ParentPay/Wonde/Groupcall etc. Then MCAS users with parents and student portal accounts etc.

[Julian]

The big problem with summer is the exams, the migration cannot take over details about exams is progress, and with results appels and remarks, that can stretch in September. Easter avaoids the issue.

[AlistairB1983]

We are currently planning a migration from SIMS to Bromcom, does anyone have thoughts on when is the best time to migrate? Bromcom have suggested Easter, take a copy of the data on the first day of the break and then we have a few days of the break left to work on staff and permissions. SMT however would prefer doing it over the summer.

What did you do? Did it go well?

TIA for any replies.

Your SMT are wrong. Summer migrations are the single dumbest idea imaginable. Not only will it make checking your data transfer infinitely more difficult as data will be moving around (i.e. promoting year groups, timetable changes etc.), but you're also going to be asking staff to learn a new system during the single busiest month of the year for almost all admin roles.

 

This just sounds like an SMT 'wouldn't it be nice ...' idea rather than a realistic suggestion that has been properly thought out and researched. Yes, it would be nice if a school could just launch a new MIS at the start of an academic year, it does make things much neater and tidier. But it's not as a simple as that, and trying to force it to be is just going to cause more problems than it will solve.

 

We migrated this year, at Easter (albeit to Arbor not Bromcom). Was the summer term slightly clunky with certain aspects? Yes - exams still used SIMS (I wasn't going to ask my EO to re-sit everything in Arbor!) and for reports I still entered data into SIMS for the final batch of reports (so parents still got a report with the cumulative year's data on it). But it meant that, come September, all our staff were up to speed with using Arbor so this academic year they've just launched straight into it rather than having to muck about for weeks/months trying to sort things and learn how to do stuff.

[pete]

We moved 5 schools (2 secondaries, 3 primaries) over a 2-week Autumn half-term, with the first test cutover (for exams officers, admin staff, attendance officers, timetablers, DSLs, cover managers, MIS herders, subject leads, hr staff etc to spot-check their data) in October.

 

We did a lot of prep work (scheduling follow-on migrations of third-party services, preparing data, dealing with edge cases, having back-up plans, checking and confirming third-party integrations, exporting historical staff leaver data to PDF, testing Salamander document export) over the summer holidays.

 

Make them check their data. Ensure SLT makes sure those people have got the time and capacity to check their respective data areas and fights their corner in the face of lower-priority competing requests.

 

On the scale from "went terribly" to "everything was rainbows and unicorns", it was more toward the unicorn end (way better than we expected).

[psydii]

 

I think September day 1 go live would be brave

 

Indeed, I think that @PICNIC should commend SLT for making such a courageous decision.

Edited December 19, 2024 by psydii

[KSCSIT]

We migrated this year, at Easter (albeit to Arbor not Bromcom). Was the summer term slightly clunky with certain aspects? Yes - exams still used SIMS (I wasn't going to ask my EO to re-sit everything in Arbor!) and for reports I still entered data into SIMS for the final batch of reports (so parents still got a report with the cumulative year's data on it). But it meant that, come September, all our staff were up to speed with using Arbor so this academic year they've just launched straight into it rather than having to muck about for weeks/months trying to sort things and learn how to do stuff.

 

When you refer to letting exams still use SIMS, how did that then work with the results coming back into SIMS & then needing to be reimported into Arbor later? Or did it not matter?

Also - in our inital migration all of our existing exams timetables have come through, did they not come through at all when you did your migration? (Same goes for report data I suppose!)

[supportman]

We did it over easter, I think it was the best time personally.

 

No real issues with the migration as we had a test database to play with for a couple of weeks beforehand to show off and let people use.

[Linfit]

We did this two years ago and chose Feb half term. Easter is definitely better than summer. If you get something wring that screws up the first day of term in Sept its going to be much harder to recover from than dealing with it in the summer term. It also gives you time to sort out issues with timetable transfer, get your head around curriculum management and gives your data manager time to sort out assessment and things and the summer to refine it. The only issue is exams - if you have done entries in SIMS they will carry over no problem, but not sure about seating plans - we had the entries in SIMS but managed everything after entry deadline in Bromcom. One of the reasons we picked the half term.

[AlistairB1983]

When you refer to letting exams still use SIMS, how did that then work with the results coming back into SIMS & then needing to be reimported into Arbor later? Or did it not matter?

Also - in our inital migration all of our existing exams timetables have come through, did they not come through at all when you did your migration? (Same goes for report data I suppose!)

We didn't import the results into SIMS - they just went straight into Arbor. It did flag that we had a bunch of results where there was no entry, but it didn't stop the import.

 

And no, when we did our migration the entries came through without being confirmed (hence the above mentioned errors) and the timetables/seating plans didn't come through at all - possibly because the entries hadn't been confirmed.

 

Had I been in school I probably would have confirmed them (I also line manage the EO, so she would have happily let me!) but I was un/luckily on paternity leave during our 'go live' date, and by the time I returned we were pretty much straight into the start of the GCSEs, so it seemed pointless to try and 'fix' anything by then.

[Iain.Faulkner]

We did it over the summer and I wish we hadn't. Staff did some training prior to the summer break and promptly forgot it all. Nothing wrong with the process from Bromcom though. Staff at our schools didn't engage as fully as they should and as a result the school processes weren't in place and permissions were incorrect for staff. It's taken us months of work to get to a usable point. They kept telling us they were doing the training and it just wasn't the case.

[supportman]

We did it over the summer and I wish we hadn't. Staff did some training prior to the summer break and promptly forgot it all. Nothing wrong with the process from Bromcom though. Staff at our schools didn't engage as fully as they should and as a result the school processes weren't in place and permissions were incorrect for staff. It's taken us months of work to get to a usable point. They kept telling us they were doing the training and it just wasn't the case.

Permissions is really important to get right, that was our biggest learning as well.

 

I'd advise giving office staff and SLT a high level of permissions at first (without personnel) and then remove them as time goes on if required. Will save a lot of headaches at first.

[dmj]

Permissions is really important to get right, that was our biggest learning as well.

 

I'd advise giving office staff and SLT a high level of permissions at first (without personnel) and then remove them as time goes on if required. Will save a lot of headaches at first.

 

zero trust principals in reverse

[pete]

We did it over the summer and I wish we hadn't. Staff did some training prior to the summer break and promptly forgot it all. Nothing wrong with the process from Bromcom though. Staff at our schools didn't engage as fully as they should and as a result the school processes weren't in place and permissions were incorrect for staff. It's taken us months of work to get to a usable point. They kept telling us they were doing the training and it just wasn't the case.

 

Your Bromcom contact should be able to give you course completion stats for signups using a school email account.

[maxbradley]

We moved 2 secondaries and 4 primaries over summer 2023. Because of the amount of schools wanting to do similar, we didn't have choice over what days or how many schools would be moved. We were told to get the data from SIMS to them on X day, and we'd get the live systems back 2 weeks later. I believe you'll have a bit more flexibility at Easter.

 

One thing to bear in mind is how long it takes your third-party systems to adjust to your new MIS. You won't be able to give them the details they need to connect to Bromcom until you have your live system, so this will add to the time your full system is out of action. Wonde is really good, they will have reoriented to Bromcom in 3 days, but Catering systems can take longer (and can cost a lot) and parentpay takes ages, about a month for us. Since the parentpay delay will only affect new starters, existing students will already have been synced across, this would be a big advantage to moving at Easter.

 

RE permissions, we made sure that the few (~2) users in a school with the admin permission knew not to make any other users admins. Admins can change the roles of other users, and letting that get out of hand could rapidly lead to everyone having every permission. We also manage the actual roles themselves centrally, but admins can give any role (except admin) to any user as they see fit.