Automating the Road

I need to make this statement – I hate wasting time! So now that I’ve gotten that of my chest, here is my issue; I spend way too much wasted time behind a wheel of a car. I probably have traveled to every city and town in Georgia and Alabama. That’s a lot of time going down the road doing nothing but driving. This drove me crazy for a long time. Finally, I’ve changed my ways using technology. I would like to share one road warrior’s tools while on the road.

First and foremost is a GPS. Nothing says wasted time more than being lost. As I mentioned, I am all over the place and many visits are first visits. Yes, there is Map Quest, Google Maps, etc., but nothing beats a talking voice (mine is an Australian women) telling you exactly where to turn. I can’t tell you how many times my Garmin saved me from being late. Now with traffic alerts, speech recognition and other new features, a GPS is a must.

My next goal was automating my phone calls. I make my living evangelizing the benefits of using technology to automate work processes. This means I need to talk to the right people who want and need to hear my message. I am real funny about making calls from the car. Frequently when you’re talking to someone travelling down the highway, you can’t understand what they are saying. This is not a good first impression. I try to make the bulk of my calls when I stop for gas or food. So that I don’t waste precious time, I need to be organized about who I am calling. I have a spreadsheet attached to a clipboard which was produced from my Sales Force Automation system. This includes present customers, prospects in the pipeline, referrals, and cold leads. You would be surprised how many people I can touch this way in a week.

This next tool is more addiction than technology, listening to podcasts. I am a knowledge junkie and nothing feeds my addiction more than the thousands of podcasts that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Any subject that interests you, I guarantee there is a podcast out there. My favorites cover technology, sales improvement, running a business, blues guitar and cooking. Whether you want to learn a new language, strike it rich in the stock market, learn to grow a garden or just fill your brain with totally useless knowledge, it’s out there for the downloading for free. It is a great way to educate your self.

My final tool is a Verizon Internet card. Yes, you can check email or surf the internet from your phone, but there are times I need to get a proposal out when I am in the middle of nowhere. I have actually sat in fast food parking lots and preformed software demonstrations using my wireless card and GoToMeeting. My prospect on the other end never knew that I wasn’t in some high rise in downtown Atlanta. The key here is that I can do anything on the road that I can do in my office.

So now you know what I use when exploring the countryside in search of workflow bottlenecks, I would love to know what other road warriors use to keep them productive while out conquering the world.

Automating “Response to Intervention” for Education

This has been a very rewarding week. After 2 years of crafting a technology solution to help a specific area of K12 Public Education, a school district took the first steps in making my vision a reality.

This all started when I was sitting down speaking to one of my neighbors. She is involved in helping carry out the Special Education process in a school district. She mentioned that there was a new program to evaluate a child who might be in need of Special Education services; this new program is called “Response to Intervention” (RTI). This program had replaced the previous one in hopes that a child would be better assessed and a specific instructional program could be designed for them.

The issue with this new program is that it is information intensive. Like the name says, there are “interventions” with the child to evaluate what skills they have and what skills they need. This happens on a weekly basis and could be with the general class, in small groups, or as individuals, depending on what “tier” of intervention they are at. As you can imagine, this requires a lot of dedicated time from the teacher, which reduces the time spent with their 20+ other students. There are forms to be filled out, data to be collected, testing to be done, progress monitoring to be completed and much more. Plus, they need to know when to get other support personnel involved and provide them with the right information.

My nature is to be a problem solver, so I dove into RTI to see what I could come up with. I saw a number of software programs available to address the different parts of RTI, mainly screening and progress monitoring programs, but no real programs to address the whole process. I decided my priority would be solving the problem of teachers spending too much time filing out paperwork. I also wanted to offer a solution that worked with the current software they already knew and was installed in the district.

My solution was to create an end-to-end automation of the RTI process and make everything electronically based. There would be no more gathering of information on paper, where it would then have to be manually entered in another system. We took all of their paper forms and made them intelligent electronic forms that communicated with their current installed software. The electronic forms will guide the teachers through the process of filling them out. Once filled out, they are electronically sent to all who need to work on them or approve them. The data from the forms can also automatically populate progress monitoring applications, Student Information Systems, data analysis graphs, and other internal applications.

My goal is to dramatically reduce the time teachers spend filing out forms, so they can do more important things, such as being in front of students. My other goal, is that the accuracy of the whole process is increased, leading to a better designed educational program for the student in need.

I will undoubtedly blog more about this as the solution gets rolled out. There is much work to do, but the cause and goal are worth it.

I welcome any comments you might have.