Context

Mulyavardhan is a program focused on Value-education and implemented in the state-run primary schools of Maharashtra and Goa state. The State education department called ‘State Council of Education, Research and Training’ is the designated implementing agency. A nonprofit organization named Shantilal Muttha Foundation is supporting the implementation of this program and including projects as a technical partner. It includes responsibilities like curriculum design, capacity building of teachers, designing processes, program management, evaluation and research.

Need

Effective program-management system is characterized by efficient processes handling, checkpoints, feedback and real-time interactions with all program stakeholders. Monitoring and evaluation systems should allow detailed data analysis, reporting. Informative and relevant dashboards are critical to understanding program effectiveness and its impact. Another requirement of large-scale Program Management is a tool to design capacity building plan, putting it on the calendar, collecting feedback, processing it in time and providing continuous support. Efficient information flow desires a standard digital communication channel which can store messages, easy to access, available all the time and deliver in time.

Complexity

Dynamicity, changing requirements and lack of robust processes are distinguishing characterize of the government programs running for rural areas of India. Lack of internet connectivity, low-end devices and naïve users adds to that challenge. Another limitation is the lack of funds to implementation, which challenges Solution Designer to offer low-cost solutions, Technical Architects to simplify the technical designs and Program Managers to run the show with available human resources. Stringent timelines due to external influences is another challenge which makes project planning tougher.

Solution

Recognizing the importance of technology for effective program management and Monitoring & evaluation systems for such large-scale programs, I conceptualized, designed and got the platform implemented for a nonprofit organization. This platform was implemented using the latest technologies like Salesforce as an enterprise solution, MySql-MongoDB as databases, and PHP on the server-side. Data Analysis was done through the server-side scripting, and Data Visualisation Dashboards were developed using Tableau.

Program Management

This project was implemented using the Agile/Scrum methodology. There were usually two-week sprints which included everything from requirement analysis, technical design, implementation, QA and (internal/external) demos. The program management team and Scrum master were responsible for creating the pipeline with epics and stories. Apart from client delivery, end-user experience testing and study were crucial processes. All dev-ops processes were followed, which included the use of versioning (GitHub), continuous integration/deployment (Jenkins), code reviews, and regular audits. Documentation was the most complex part due to a lot of Change requests and iterative nature of the agile methodology. Jira was a bug-tracking tool, and Asana agile templates were helpful for program management.

Impact

This platform reached 100000 state school teachers and government stakeholder through its mobile application. It automated processes like Classroom Observations and increased capacity to conduct more than 900 classroom observations per day. After implementing this system, the maximum of 52000 such observations was reported in a quarter during 2018, and it continued after that.

This system allowed to manage more than 1000 capacity building workshops in a year, and also collected qualitative feedback from more than 10000 trainers. Training progress was monitored through the live dashboards which were happening first time in the government education department.

It implemented a simplified form builder to incorporate varying data collection needs of the government programs. An organization could make dashboards accessible to more than 300 field coordinators taking care of 415 sub-districts of Maharashtra state, and 25 field coordinators from Goa state. All the Government District and State offices also got access to the progress reports.

Adoption

This program was catering to 190000 state government teachers, 5000 government cluster officers and 300 field staff. Adoption of the technological solution is the biggest challenge for such lay users. I have conducted the training and query solving sessions myself. This product also incorporated the ‘Less is better’ UX principle to achieve better user acceptance.