Ch-Ch-Ch Changes: Change Management in Slate

I just wanted to say to the group just our leadoff writers were going to do intros real quick after after coding introduces and I think we're just gonna listen. I'm going to be first just a second. Thomas third.

Yep, and I'm gonna put it right back at you.

Alright.

Talk to I'm going to say the themes real quick, right?

Hello everyone, welcome we're just going to give it a couple of seconds just to let people continue to pour in and then we'll get started, but we're very excited and thanks everyone for taking some time to join us today.

People are coming in at a steady rate.

Alright, so we are going to go ahead and get started.

I'm good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us for another wonderful sleep stage session. These topic is one that is familiar to just about everyone change management. In slates we all have to face it at some point. Change happens whether we like it to or not. Not being said, some pages are welcome ones. Not everything. Is that unpleasant change. But Speaking of change, today's webinar will be just a little bit different from some of our earlier sessions as opposed to a more formalized presentation complete with slide deck.

Our panel of experts will be in conversation around this topic and I really couldn't be more excited about it. I think the one thing that would probably make me more excited as someone told me about Swedish super group ABBA was getting back together, but I somehow severely doubt that will happen. So before I go on to introduce our panel, who in all honesty are a group of folks who really need no introduction, let's go ahead and take care of some housekeeping.

Uh, Nathan, I see you and support you and chat on that one alright. Housekeeping this web and R is being recorded and will be made available for viewing within 24 hours for fleet Festival Passholders and it will remain available until July 31st. Closed captioning can be enabled by clicking the CC button in the top right hand corner of the rear window. Full screen viewing hand be enabled by clicking the little expand button at the top right hand corner and should you need to rethink your audio or video at any point, please go ahead and refresh your share window.

Questions can of course be posted in the chat and we will have time at the end for our panel to go ahead and answer some questions.

And of course, I just want to take a moment to thank my absolutely stellar colleagues, Elizabeth, who is helping me out in the chat today, and Leah, without whom none of this would have come together. So thank you both very much and without further ado, let's meet today's speakers.

So joining us we have Abraham Noel from PHB, Jess Ricker from Wellesley College and Dom Rozzi with also from PHB. A group of panelists who have been together many times before and every single time. It is incredibly exciting to hear you all speak and just I feel like I've been on a journey with you all over several years now. And yeah, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you guys. I'll pop back on at the end. We have questions. Enjoy everyone.

That was quite a setup, Cody. Thank you. We hope we live up to it now. Like you said, Cody today is really going to be more of a free flowing conversation, so maybe a little different than some of the other presentations.

The kind of lead off I will just introduce ourselves. My name is Abraham Noel. I am a senior integration consultant at PHB a little bit about my history. I started at PHB approximately a year ago. Little bit less than a year ago. Prior to that I worked at Macalester College for 13 years.

And eight of those years was as the slate captain Slash lately to help implement the system and then kind of enhance it and build it as we have it at McAlister.

So turn it over to Jess.

Hi everyone, just Ricker I'm Dean of admission at Wellesley College. Shout out to the Wellesley alums who posted in the chat. So I started my admission career at Connecticut College back in 2000 and was a traditional counselor and somehow started to sort of love my way into being a data wonk and took over systems work, working with Banner and things like that and used to say that I would piece tools together with duct tape until we were fortunate enough to implement slate starting in 2014, and I became slate captain and build out our.

Slate instance there and then three years ago, moved to Wellesley College. Never would move to a school that didn't have slate or wasn't willing to implement slate, and I'm excited to be here to talk about all the changes today, Dom.

Thanks, Jess. So I my name is Dominic Roz I I am also a senior integration consultant and RHP I did just happen to see in the chat real quick. What is PHB? PHB is a.

Marketing consultancy work in Higher Ed specifically and enable schools to sort of best leverage their marketing resources and tools. Slate being one of those tools.

I I don't really know why I'm here, I'm actually just reveling in the in the in the vast glory of Jess and Abraham, my colleagues here and I'm really excited to sort of just chime in here in there, throwing in a little bit of Nuggets around how we can navigate through these process, but I'm going to pass it back over to Abraham to kind of get started here.

Thanks Tom, so today like like you're saying before this is going to be more of a free flowing conversation. Hopefully you know the goal. I think of this is to hopefully not necessarily that you're going to have specific things you can go back and change and sleep. That's not the point of this conversation. You may have some of that. We hope you get some of that too, but more that we think about the sort of the topic of change and change management and how that specifically relates to Slate. You know when we started this conversation, we kind of the three of us thought about different themes, and I think.

Just maybe articulating those scenes at the beginning when maybe help. It also helps us get going in terms of the conversation. So one was the theme of knowledge you know and this idea that keeping current can slate is really important to change management. So knowing what Slate can do at any given moment is super important.

The second one, which is no less important and may actually be more important, is the people aspect of it. So the system is just one component of this larger process. This larger management and change management strategy you need to incorporate people are a huge bit of that, and you know the theme of right time, right process, right? People is really important. And then I think a third theme which is no less important is sustainability. So in essence you know how do you build a better mousetrap and do it in a way where it can be maintained over a long period of time.

If you build something in slate that only one person can manage and maintain that one person moves on wins the lottery as we like to say or moves on to a different position or different job, then you're kind of stuck with the process that isn't sustainable. So the question is how do you build those processes from the very beginning to make them sustainable, so that can be managed by multiple people. The other aspect of sustainability is this idea that what if the systems a touch late change so we're the processes that touch light change? How do you manage?

Build this in such a way where it can sort of manage that and do it effectively, so hopefully those will talk through those three themes as we talk over the next roughly 40 minutes, and then we have a little bit of question and answer at the end where hopefully we have a little bit more of a free flowing conversation with the with you on on the other end so that I'll maybe turn it over to one of my colleagues who would like to go first. I think maybe on the theme of knowledge keeping current slate.

So I'll I can I can kind of maybe kick off some some initial thoughts?

So when I think about knowledge and keeping current with slate, there's the obvious sort of personnel side of it and wrote education.

But there's there's a lot of sort of other components to it, and one of them are enabling business practices to be supported by the tools.

Right, and so when we look at at sort of evaluating business practices. What are some of the basic thought processes that you guys have with with how to take?

Take that sort of evolution right next. Take take a next step through through using your systems.

So I mean when you say take next step, I think one of the things when I think about change management and slate is that.

Many people try to fit their practice into slate instead of stopping and really looking at what are our actual needs. Just because some other slate school does step AB&C are steps may actually need to be a E&K, and so really carefully analyzing your own sort of business you know your own business process analysis your own needs, enrollment goals.

And starting there and thinking about building a solution that buffers and supports or buttress is right. Your needs and not just trying to take something. Some tool in slate and build something that might look like what another institution does. So you know, the knowledge is both. I think outward facing. And what Slate offers but also knowledge of your own internal needs. An processes is clearly one of those pieces. Abraham do you want to add anything on there?

Yeah, totally.

I, I'm over the opinion and I may be in the minority about this, but I don't. I don't think so. I really think that on your team, strategically you should have someone who is affectively tasked with knowing Slate.

And ideally you have more than one person, but at least one person. Now, if you're in a school that's lucky enough to have a staff person, you could completely dedicated to that. That's wonderful. That's the ideal situation, or even a small. You know if you're a larger school and you have a whole team, and then there's hopefully some people on the line there in that situation that's even better.

But if you're if you're a school that doesn't have that person still having somebody on your team that is charged with the task of what's going on in slate so that includes, like the basic training you know, you go to the launchpad. I don't know if it's still going to be branded Launchpad, but something like you know the basic training is late then is involved. Hopefully with the implementation. But if they can't do that, you give them the resources and time to learn the system as best they can, and then beyond that. Then they're kind of the person or group of people that would be plugged into the changes.

So knowledge comes with knowing what is changing this late. So for example, having the time to go to a webinar that you know we're slate or text Aleutians rolled out a new feature. One of the things that just came out recently with Slate video, Slate video, right?

On the surface, you might have a sense of what that is, but just by the title, but knowing what it really is requires that somebody go in and actually sit through the web and R look at the documentation and then the second piece of this, and I think this gets back to what just was saying can tie that potentially to what it needed at your institution. So simply having that knowledge isn't enough. You need to also have knowledge around the business process of your institution. Now there might be something in Slate would be ideal for Graduate School.

But doesn't make sense for undergraduate school, just to kind of use those two examples. So having somebody who not only understands what Slate can do, but how it potentially could relate to your school is huge. And you know my mind building that expertise is kind of connecting to different things that are out there. There's lots of community resources. There are forms, and maybe my colleagues can speak a little bit more about those kind of things too.

Yeah, so I was. I was gonna say you know you bring up resources and that's sort of a it's A.

It's one of it elicits a really warm reaction for me because one of the biggest things that became apparent to me as I moved into the Slate universe way back in 2012 was I was joining into a group of people who were intimately interested, ultimately interested in having a knowledge share.

So it wasn't this really competitive. We need to win that student over this other school, but here's how. Here are the challenges that were faced with and how have you overcome them and how do you understand the system and how do you work these things into your processes?

Yeah.

And that's the community became such an attractive sort of space for me as as an individual that I started plugging in hard, and which ultimately, really, you know, sort of translated into me spending just as much time doing Slate community work as it did, doing actual like institutional mark. But it was so important to make sure that I was collecting as much as I could, and I was sharing as much as I could in that and that collegiality.

Of the communities is incredible, and it's now extended into other forums so we have listservs if you're not in the Northwestern listserv, Northwestern listserv. We've got regional slate user groups, so there's all over the country. There's there's regional groups, and if you can find out who's in your regional groups jump in, get involved, ask questions. I mean, that's why we work with a lot of newer schools and.

I can give you answers, but you can ask 10 questions of 10 people and get 10 answers right versus asking 10 questions of me over the span of much longer of a time frame to be able to get those answers.

Yeah.

And plugging into all these communities and really sort of using all of the resources that you have available to us critical. Very important to not only just being able to solve the immediate right, but also to be able to extend the knowledge and expand. I came across this euphemism awhile back, but sort of the idea of rising waters raises all ships right? And that was sort of at the core of this Lake community, which is beautiful.

You know, I would also go right, so that's an outward looking way of thinking about sort of connection, but I think you know one of the things for anybody who's an enrollment management enrollment Manager, Dean Director who's thinking about staffing configurations here today. You know, as Abraham said, making sure that there is time to explore to stay current in slate.

That someone reads this latest news, and even if they're not building out a module, they're sending it on to the folks would be working on something relevant there and saying, hey, how do you think we could use this and deliver? Or where could we build this out? And so I think it's about thinking about how you support the staff who are involved in slate and making sure that they're not just off in a basement somewhere, right? Like just doing the slate stuff, right? I think the places that innovate the most that get the most out of slate that are truly innovative.

The slate people are, you know, to quote Hamilton in the room where it happens, right there, listening to enrollment goals, needs pain points that teams or individuals are facing wish lists, and so they can say, OK, well, I can take this process and with this new tool instead of these eight steps we can now do it in three with some automation and with more personalization and who doesn't want that? But it really is about, and I think I'm leading us into right people right process.

And the right time for change, right? But it I really believe that you need to support the individuals who are leading the technology. And then you're going to get the technology support you need from from that. So you know thoughts about the right process and the right time for change.

So summer is a great time for some easy cleanup, but we can't just all wait for the summer to do it all, so you know, how do we squeeze it in? What are some thoughts on on that? Abraham and Dom?

That's a really good one. I mean delete into because.

You know it's late is interesting. There are some things that you can do and you can do it in a way where no one notices anything changes.

I love that about it. You know, that's one of the coolest things is that you can make a major infrastructure change and if you do it in the right way at the right time.

The end users, whether they be your individual users at your institution, actually using slate administratively or they be.

Right?

Right?

Your applicants or your perspective students? If you do it in the right way, they won't even necessarily know that anything has been reconfigured. To me. That is kind of I like to use the plumber analogy. Plumbing is one of those things that is taken for granted, right? We have it in our houses. You turn the stick it in, the water comes out, but boy, if it isn't there, you notice. And like Slate, there are things that really fit into that category of plumbing. They can be reorganized, they can be changed and they can be done in a way where it's just not.

Yeah.

Right?

Notice, but it gives you lots of access to other things. I think about things like prompt organization inside the prompt tool. I think about things like put some notes in the fields potentially. It's also like can you transition from reoccuring emails to campaign driven emails? So that's an example where externally there may be no difference, but internally you have jumped ahead multiple years and you're able to do it in a way where it's transparent to the outside world. It just works internally.

Yeah.

Now that lets segment that off from things that really do have some impact externally. You know if you start changing all year round definitions in Slate, you better be real careful about that. If you're doing a mid cycle. So I think the trick here in terms of thinking about when to do things is to have a good list and understanding when to separate those kind of things. So can you do something internally where it is affectively a system change but no, no one externally will see it or it will be a minimal change? Or is it something that really does need to be broken off taken out?

Highly tested before you put it in, and that's where using your instance is huge because you could do a lot of that work and test safely as opposed to doing in production.

Tom, do you have any thoughts about any of that stuff?

Yeah, now it brings up all sorts of interesting interplays with the do's and don'ts.

In in terms of the outward facing right versus the inward facing, I think I think there's you kind of alluded to it identifying or creating or having a list, right? The running sets of things that we want to spend our time looking at to create efficiencies to create that change.

Is is vitally important and I know I know this only from.

From my experience in at the institutional level.

You know we had running Google Docs of our wishlists and there was a there was time that we had to dedicate to. This can be done this cycle. This has to be deferred off to a future cycle. You know what this thing might not ever happen for us just because of the time investment are and what else sort of we have going on as it relates to meeting institutional goals and being able to sort of keep the ship running right. And that's what we do. We keep we keep the car on the on the.

On the road.

So you know there's there's small wins. There's big wins, there's there's ways to kind of take, maybe some really heavy resource, constraining operational processes and lighten that lift in in terms of creating sort of internal use forms or some other sort of tools in a quote tools that we can build inside of the system to to create more data input.

Consistency.

Right?

Right, instead of having five fields that we need to manually go and change one by one by one and flip around all these different pages right, we could stick them in a form. And it's super easy to kind of make sure force those forms to be filled out an appropriate ways to.

Sort of create that. That efficiency, while that doesn't feel maybe like it's a huge thing, if it took the, you know if it took a staff person 7 minutes to complete a full set of tasks for a set of people. And now that form only takes 3 minutes.

4 minutes times 365 days in a year? Well, let's say.

Maybe 200 days a year, you know that's a huge. That's a huge time pull, you know resource gain that can be devoted to other things.

And on the kind of build on that, you know, this theme of can you make it change internally? I think that's a great example because.

Externally, nobody is going to notice anything is different in terms of the data, but internally it affects potentially one people or two or three people, but it makes their life much easier hopefully. Whereas like saying they were jumping between the records and entering things one at a time, you put it all into a data entry form and use it internally. Now you've got a process that really from a change management standpoint you can work with those three people. You talk them through, you customize it, and I love the customization thing too, because if you know it's only going to affect three or four people.

You can make that form work just for those folks. You know. You can literally have their notes there. Directions at the top, and you build it out and all of a sudden you made their life much better in terms of their ability to do that work. And I see that as a big win and I see that it's something you can do really anytime in the cycle, as long as you're careful about it.

Yeah, I mean I think the analogy we used in the description for this session was, you know, how do you rebuild the engine while you're speeding down the freeway 90 miles an hour? And I always add in, your hair is on fire, right? There's all this stuff going on and we also say in my office a lot. You know how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time and so these little changes, right? That you can make that get you closer to you know data integrity.

Yeah, those forms that Abraham and Tom mentioned or other little changes, or you sequence something out. You start to build out a process in production. You cloned a test, you turn it on in test and you do all your testing. It's good to go. You know that it's got all the dependencies are met. You go turn it on in production and again it may be possible that no one else on staff notices the difference. I mean, there's so much flexibility there, but the real challenge then is not being overwhelmed by how do you eat the elephant?

Taking it and breaking it out into bite sized steps some that you could do immediately, and then some might have to wait till a downtime. You know when you could take things offline or whatever, but I think ultimately what you need to be able to do is to see slate not as a Sprint or game of checkers, but a chess game. There are dependencies, there's long term and short term we at Wellesley have rebuilt a lot of different things in our instance, including overhauling all kinds of fields and prompts and different things like that.

And you know one little decision usually leads to a rabbit hole of you know 10 or 12 other downstream changes. So John in the chat asked about, you know configurable joins. Well, we're starting to use that in the sort of the slate core user group at Wellesley, getting ourselves trained up. PHB has a great three series training session that went out to the Slate Universe. If you're interested in watching it, and we're starting to use it more internally and then we're imagining, right? Our next steps are to start to build.

Our own configurable joins library, right? Some things in our instance that we want to build out for other users. Imagining some training for other staff and slowly moving it. One bite at a time instead of like a major overhaul all in one moment in all in kind of kind of thing. So I mean, I think that one of the areas I wanted sort of move us on to is this idea that sometimes their expectations and it may be your enrollment manager or your director who says I want this fully automated.

And what you're going to hear from Abraham Dom and I is that that should never be the goal. So let's talk about the 8020 rule or the 9010 rule and some really great advice on change management in that realm. So we all laugh, so I know we all think about this.

I'll let you start a ramp.

Sure, I'll just say. First of all, I am of the mindset that if I can automate it, I will. So in some respects I'm kind of speaking may be against the concept of the 8020 or the 9010, but I agree with it. So I have to fight against my own nature of wanting to fully automate it and let me say maybe articulate with this idea is so when slate you have this wonderful rules engine and you can make it do lots of different things.

Very powerful, I don't know though if any of you ever seen instances where it goes a little slower than you'd like, and that's you know, particularly when we get in his car HP consultants, we get in. We look at instances. We see hundreds of rules. That's where we begin to think. Did they over automate? So there's kind of a. There's kind of a nice place between full automation and what I like to call semi automation. So semi automation is this you have to go through a bunch of different things and at some point a human being has to sort of check in and look at it.

And then they make a decision, and that decision can take the form of a slate form. Or maybe they submit a form and it kicks it off to another rule or another process. And I'm talking abstractly here, so forgive me. I know. Hopefully you can relate this to things that your own institution, but I think it's something like a like a transcript review. You know you could have a workflow where the transcript review goes to a certain point and then a human being looks at it. They make a decision A or B and then it moves on.

Could you automate that? Well, potentially you could. You know, you could have a whole bunch of rules that would deal with every eventuality, but is that a good thing? And that's where I think the philosophy of this comes into play. This is where you have to be strategic and know the people you work with, know your staff, know your resources, but it may be an argument against a full automation, because if you try to fully automate that, you have to account for every single possibility. And as we all know, computers do exactly what we tell them to do. They have no judgment aspect.

At least until artificial intelligence, general artificial intelligence becomes a thing, and maybe even then it won't work. But the idea that a human being is an important part of that process because they have the judgment and the knowledge and experience, then to route things appropriately based upon what the situation and also allow for exceptions. So particularly when you're starting out, that's huge. You know I don't know Dom. Do you want to speak to any of that in terms of your experiences?

Yeah, I was. I was actually going to echo a lot of that.

Most most prominently, I think in my mind is.

It is the comment about how smart computers are when when they're they're tasked with doing the one thing that you tell them to do, the brilliant they will do it every single time.

But they will do it every single time. Exactly what you told them to do and I.

I think there's probably less scenarios that I've run across where.

We could actually create a hard and fast front to back automation for something because of the idea of Oh well, but there's one. This one thing that needs to this. One scenario that we need to sort of pull out of mix. That's kind of not how automation works so.

Right?

To do exactly, we're talking about sort of build automation to fit the 80% and allow that. Well, but the one scenario for that 20% really makes for an, and we're talking about sustainability earlier, right? Really makes for a process that not only works to create some efficiency, but also translates year over year over year in a way that that sustainable.

Yeah, and I just I want to pick up right on a point that Dom is landing on, but that Abraham sort of alluded to earlier, which is that you know this. This human intervention, right?

Clearly it makes sense when you have to have someone you know making a human judgment call. But even with the full automation that may get so complex and sophisticated that does it take your once late person all summer to build it. And are you willing to give up every summer for that person to update and maintain that? At Wellesley we do work with VHB, so we do work with Dom and there are moments when he offers up these really sophisticated, elegant solutions and their fabulous right?

Range.

At the same time, sometimes there is a reason to say no. We want to go the simple route a little. I always joke when I'm with these two 'cause they do sequel I futz with SQL, right? We're on like different different sides there. I'm country mouse their city mouse and I say you know what? I think the right thing for our team in terms of how much time we have. What are our priorities? Where do we want to spend? You know, if you think about budget as resources in your human resources, we want to spend our time in these other areas. So while we could go that more complicated route.

I with this portal I don't want us to have to maintain that right so and that could evolve and change as our team changes and grows we may make different judgment calls, sort of overhauling our slate team right now. And I think in the future we might make different decisions, but that's where this this theme of right people, right time and right process, right? It's all about prioritization because you cannot in this chess game, just checkmate without a lot of different steps. Slate really takes a lot of time to build up, so.

Yeah, and I think that leads to building a culture of change. Unless you want to add on something Dahmer, Abraham.

Right?

I just yeah, I just want quick thing because your comment really kind of spurred a thought. It's so true that understanding your team and their capacities for supporting those things is critically important.

And what you mentioned? That's for the thought for me really was is the idea of maintenance. So yes, we all understand the concept of the time to build.

But most of the things that we build.

Right?

Carry an ongoing maintenance component to them and that ongoing maintenance costs and clinical costs isn't usually a part of the calculus in there, and sometimes we find that we get caught with that.

And it is I certainly did as an institution like, yeah, we'll build it all out, build it all out in the next year. It's like, OK, we're gonna build this new stuff out and like when am I going to fix all the things that we did from last year? You know they need to be carried over into the new year.

Very difficult.

Yeah, Kurt.

Yeah, and we're sure list or documentation of all that stuff that needs to happen. Maintenance documentation is so important, so important. Otherwise, all of a sudden you're halfway into the year and something went wrong because you didn't realize you needed to update or maintain something.

Well, I get bullied at friend to this kind of leads into sustainability idea. Little bit. I think it's worth saying if you're not familiar with all the things as late as the document stuff you should get familiar because this is.

I don't know about anybody else in the call, but documentation is one of the hardest things to do from from when I was in high rate directly, not as consultant directly doing the work because you kind of have the tyranny of the urgent you have the I gotta get it done. Get it working so I move on to the next thing and by the time you're through that. Well now do I need to go back and document it. That sometimes falls down to the bottom of the list, right?

I would say if you can do it, use the inline slate documentation because in theory you can actually do that documentation as you go. It doesn't work for every case, but just articulating with some of that is you know when you look at fields inside of slate, there's a box at the bottom of that field definition where you can say what you put notes and that's not to be understated, because in that note you can put process notes you can put like what the field meant from a you know, think about institutional reporting. You have data definitions. You could put some of that in there, and the thing that's beauty.

The beautiful thing about that, it's late, if you could write a query against them and pull it back up so you can in essence have an attorney for the people on the call. But the data dictionary that you have, all the definitions associated with all the fields that's available right out of the box. You just need to set it up. And it's the kind of thing that is you if you do it as you build it, it really goes well. I mean, the other thing I would call out is that recently I'm not that recently, but a little while ago queries got the ability to put more comments and notes so you know, use that when you have queries that do things.

Or facilitative process? Use that part of slate to put with the processes 'cause. The idea is that when the next person comes in and doesn't know how it works, you can say, well, look at the comments on the query. It's just there. You don't have to tell him. Go look at the Google Doc that you access to or the word doc that's on the G drive, which is over here, and they may not have access to it. It all lives inside asleep. You know there's a place to put it. The final thing I think along that lines is there's an ability to put, you know, the little light bulb to help to help artists like you have the ability inside of sight to put.

Text that's custom to your environment. That's another example. Where, and I'll just give a personal example from my experience. We use that part of Slate for organization records when we wanted to capture these sort of data standards around it. You know, so literally, what were the data standards about doing data entry form or record? We have the whole thing listed right in that area and you just click the light bulb. Was there? So those are three examples. I think parts of Slate that sometimes are underutilized. But if you do it well, it could make your system much more sustainable and kind of make it easier to do these change management past.

Typically we have staff that are changing or the other scenario is it was so complicated you only think about it once a year and you need to go back and look at it again. Having written, you know, write it down and put it in Slate. That will be my best advice there. I don't know if that broke the stream of consciousness here, but was maybe somebody else wants to pick up that strainer. Go to a different string.

I actually I would. I would echo. I love the idea of custom content in in this late scholar.

That, in addition to simple note taking and the great thing with slate scholars, or you can put tags to different modules in the system, right? So you so you can have content that's specific to when you're on a person record, or you can have content that specific when you're in a student's decision.

That is relevant, right? To those very specific things.

My one of the things that we had to do personal personal example.

We we established a a set of templates in our event space for when other schools were hosting, right? So we didn't want registration forms to be public there. So we set up a template that was a no registration form, right versus a registration form template for the same kind of an event and that was that was a bit much for the staff to kind of.

A get get sort of wrap their mind around when they weren't building events all the time.

Yeah.

But they needed to understand that when they saw an event and it had this particular template on it.

What that meant in the in the grand scheme of things? And then, if they had to build an event to know which one to actually pick and so actually wrote up some really instructional content, it's stuck it in there and you could put images in. You can insert images and tax and all sorts of things that just kind of like drop it into slate an when they're on that page they can just click that.

You get your custom content you get then the slate standard content. You know that technicians provides really.

Right?

Enlivens your system to be very specific to your processes to your work, and can really help even a brand new person come in like, well. I don't know any of our processes.

Start reading it's right there.

Yeah.

It's right there, it's like right at your fingertips, right?

And and that is where right if you. If we're thinking a little backwards back to the people part of it right? And you're trying to build a culture that is ready for change, right? And is going along with change, right? Sometimes change resistance is, I don't have the skills or knowledge. Well, we talked about that already. You know whether it's you spend time at staff meetings or you offer you know time to watch. You know video and videos and webinars. You know, Launchpad, you know the festival, things like that.

People are afraid to fail. You build a culture where it's OK to to fail. You fail quick, you fail fast. You have a great idea. You give it a try. You learn how to test right there, things to be learned from failures, how to test better learning about the system, right? But supporting the people around it. Usually I found sometimes the resistance is that people are afraid they're going to do the wrong thing and it becomes almost paralytic, right. They become paralyzed and so having that inline documentation.

So they can follow a step by step and it's knowing how much documentation your team needs. Do they need detailed screenshots with a picture of every button, or do they just need kind of a quick list of steps right? And so really knowing what it means to succeed? Because then you've got the right people doing the right processes. And there is sustainability and all of a sudden, because you're spending less time cleaning up data 'cause it's getting done right the first time, wondering where something went wrong with the process? There you have automatically.

Right, your win has just save you time to do more document updates right along the way. I think one of the key things is that I've learned in the 6-7 years I've been doing slate and we've done a lot of change at Wellesley. One of the things I worry about is.

How much more change can the team take before they break, right? 'cause I'm changing this I'm changing that we're doing all these cool things and people are excited about the changes, but at the same time, if you're not supporting the people along the way, both the end users as well as you know other staff in the office, you're going to find that. That excitement and enthusiasm isn't isn't going to be there, so sometimes just a small win, right? If you've got a small team, that sort of set on doing something in a certain way, like finding a win where they can.

I'm bored with it like the change. Have the documentation they need and you build up trust and in muscles right that are ready for it for that kind of change. So it's clear that you need that with Slate because it keeps you know it's an iterative process to go through every year. So we have we moved into cycle maintenance, then some dots there.

Can I just add one quick thing 'cause this was? Also it was in the four of my mind is we're thinking about change, but right when we keep pressing change and keep pressing chain to create create more efficiencies, create more efficiencies.

There's a potential that somebody is like, Oh my gosh, I'm getting phased out of a job and that's a real hard. That's a real hard nut to crack and you find a lot of change resistors because of that job insecurity or job security component.

I took a couple different approaches, but I'm curious to get your thoughts and just really quickly. We can take just a minute on it in in terms of how do we evolve somebody's thought process from I have to do this thing too. I can let the system do what it does really well and I can actually kind of make sure the system is doing what the system is doing really well as as a function in there.

Please do.

I think Cody is joining here to give us a time check so we're getting close to the Q&A session, but I'll do a quick quick answer to that one, but I think it's a it's a critical thing because it I'll say in my experience that's come up the my going to lose my job because it's late scenario that's that's kind of a realist, reductionist way of looking at it and.

To me, I think it's a couple of things, so one is first of all, you know, make the person aware that a lot of what slate is doing is it is a computer system, so it's not going to replace human judgment, and that's where you need to focus. So what? What can be extracted? That task that does require human judgement and build on the talents of that person versus allowing the system to do the routine picks #2 is really bringing it back to how does this serve your students? You know, I think for a lot of us get into higher Ed because we want to help students. We want people to.

Grow in your education and as individuals, and you know by making these changes, are you serving students better? And frankly, that's another side to this that if you make a change and it doesn't do that, you should probably re-evaluate that change. You know that to me is a maximum. I think I would apply both ways because it's important that you bring everything back to ultimately serving your students.

Assuming you're in higher Ed, or if you're in a different type of organization, is your customers right? It's going to be one or the other.

The other then thing is and this is important. Is that even if that person is then perhaps the lowest level position at the institution in your Department, they still connect to the big picture there. So part of the big questions they are part of the process and showing the value to them that their piece of data tying it back to that larger mission is huge. And not only is a good from the standpoint that they understand their role, but it also is great for the Racine because they are seen as a valued member of the team. And if you're valued and you feel like you could, you know you're part of that team.

I think, frankly, we'll be able to absorb changes better because you see the bigger picture and you can see where we're going. There's a plan, and by doing that you help that person work through that change. Now, that said, I just I don't know if you had any more comments in this, but I also want to be mindful of Cody, 'cause he's on here for the Q and a bit too.

I'm just going to add really quickly that right when we talked about like automation to get the 80% that other 20%. Or maybe it's 90 and 10. Maybe it's the gap years right? That are the thing you can't automate for or whatever it may be.

You can then take that time that this person isn't spending on a previous process and have them do more personalized sort of work. Or you know, service right to that group, right? We've all got the.

The squeaky wheel. Who's reaching out to our office or other things that we want to get to right and then the other piece of it is you're empowering them to take on a bigger role, right? Then what had previously could be boiled down to not a menial task, but something that could be automated. You can elevate an empower right and to the comment in the chat about resistance, right? It takes a long time to earn trust. You have to earn the trust and never ask anyone on my team to do something that I'm not willing to roll up my sleeves and do with them.

If it isn't.

Yeah.

I'm really trying to listen and I need to keep listening right to hear what is going on with folks and where they are, but building that culture of change where people are willing to go along for the ride, it takes a real time and some real investment of effort on who the part of whoever is leading that change. So I'll get off my soapbox Cody and you can.

No, no, I I'm almost for myth and having to kind of jump in here because I've been having a really great time listening to it and it really does bring me back to my time in higher end. And Abraham, I love that you sort of brought it back to it's about serving the students because when I think of hierarchy, it's a labor of love. It's something you do out of passion.

And that's always important in thinking of any way we can make that experience that are more accessible. The winds that we can get. Those are really, really big deals and you all brought up a wonderful array of topics.

Related to sort of change management and it's kind of inspiring really, because there are many different ways to go about it, and I think sort of those closing thoughts that you shared on the idea of, you know, buying and showing people the benefits of things like I've found that that is a great way to go about it.

Just about to turn to questions, but really, quickly, and somewhat selfishly. Before that I just have to shout out to Dad Mccue my former boss without her. I would not have ended up in slate land. She trusted me quite a bit. So hey Devin, thanks OK y'all. Ready for the questions.

Yes, Sir.

Out.

Bring it on.

Bring it on.

So we've got a lot of different things in a lot of different directions that we can go in here, but let's see.

There was one that came in that really interested me on kind of the idea of different institution type. So there obviously four year institutions, such seller follow a traditional cycle and then there are lots of institutions that don't. Perhaps they're rolling admissions and sort of. How do you balance with this idea of change round trip? You may not necessarily have the traditional downtime, which I very much put in quotation, 'cause it never felt like downtime.

And sort of if any of you have kind of thoughts, advice in that regard.

Yeah.

Instances do instances. I'm sorry that I didn't catch you out there, but instance management is everything with rolling admissions, you have a test environment, use it. Don't try to do it in protection, but with that said Dom please.

I was going to say this is this. This falls right into the into the how to eat elephant conversation for me small chunks. Small small chunks.

Identifying the things that you want to change.

Identifying within those things, what are the steps to be able to enact that change and then start working on each one of those things?

In the test environment, absolutely right. And if it's a matter of even even the clean slate environment could be another place where it's like, hey we need to bolster some experience. Some of our experiences there are some things that are pre built and we can look at them.

Get in there, start looking at it. Start working on building those muscles, right? That's really what that's about, but but really kind of breaking it down to the smallest components and then work each of those components fully, understanding how they interplay with each other and what the downstream effect of any of those things would be in implementing them in line. 'cause that's really what we're doing in a rolling admission scenarios work. We're just kind of. There's going to stop and start point, and we just stick it in. We have to.

Make sure that we understand all of the sort downstream pieces of that as well, but it's really small chunks.

Excellent, I've got a question lined up that sort of goes into a little bit of kind of what Celeste just commented about, but sort of. At least it will get there in my mind anyway. How do you kind of balance this idea of staying in the room to be part of these business processes in these discussions?

What?

And sort of making sure that you have that kind of ample time to keep in the know in terms of what's happening with Slate. I know we talked a little bit about that during your discussion, but it's one of those things that's worth bearing because sometimes, at least in my can feel really overwhelming to sort of think about, you know, the awesome part of Summit was, yeah, we got 100 new features, but it's when am I going to find time for under the new features? Plus all of the other things that I need to do is just part of my daily existence.

I mean, it can be easy to get overwhelmed.

At my previous institution, right, I had a constant running file that kind of listed priority and interdependencies, but but really in the end, right? I think that like a lot of other strategic planning processes, it should be mission driven. How do we best serve our students? And there is room. I think over I can do these five quick tasks. I can do this one bigger or meteor task that's going to have a major impact on how well we serve our students, or how much easier we make things for our staff so.

I think there needs to be an empowerment for some decision making about prioritizing those things and then a project management system. We use Airtable now at Wellesley, and it's where we're keeping our running list of everybody's wish list. And you know, notes on. Yep, this has been communicated. This is, you know, a next year kind of thing. We think we can squeeze this in the summer. Our list of the dependencies you know in an in sorts of things like that.

It can be challenging when everyone comes back. Oh, did you hear about so in school that's doing this? Can we have that? And it's kind of it. Can put a lot of pressure right? On the folks who are who are leading slate. So the change management is expectation management right of other folks and that can be difficult if you don't have a decision making hierarchy in place. Lot of conversations on our team happen and I have to say I'm going to kind of manage and we're just going to have to tell this other team that this isn't going to happen as quickly.

Because I need the team to focus on this bigger priority, and so that's a role that I play, but not every institution has.

The slate team has that empowerment.

I would add two things. Just quickly one is for wherever possible, distributing the load.

And it may not be that that other person that you're you're tasking with or or getting help from, is fully fully understanding everything that's going on about what needs to happen. But if somebody has the capacity to take on some of those smaller tasks, or more finite tasks, right, that could be really beneficial. And the other one that sort of struck struck me as you were talking Jess is.

On it totally just lost it.

Shoot

uhm?

What I got one done by confirming here.

God.

The I know for me I tend to be an analyzer, so I want all the information I'm going to speak to my own experience, but I suspect other people are like this too. They want all the information before they can make a choice.

And there's good things about that, but the downside of that strategy is something you know. The buzzword is analysis paralysis, right? So you're waiting for all the information to come in to know what's going to happen before you make any choice.

I think the tendency is for that to happen with slate sometimes because there could be hundreds of choices and our friends at technicians like to add more every time they can. So I love that about it, but it also creates a sense of what if they have this new thing at your from now. What am I going to do then? And I've found that when I get into that mindset that analysis paralysis, you know the call out in my own mind and then do the thing that is against that, which is to take some stuff so if nothing else is working, do something.

And and that something could be really small. I'm not suggesting you go and review your entire system. Don't do that. But what I would suggest you do is you know, going back to this idea of how do you get started, we'll do something small and that then can spur action in other ways. I think it's a psychological thing, but I think there's something to from the standpoint that if you don't break that analysis paralysis, you'll never move forward. So you have to. When you see the dynamic of I can't move forward in less. I know everything and it's all perfect. Stop yourself.

Yep.

I.

And.

Really evaluate whether that's true and then pick something and do it so you get some forward momentum and that momentum will build the other things, and I think 2 and a team that can help because you can go back to the next step. You can say, well, we didn't put in your robust, you know ten part change asleep, but I did get a new prop value in and it's documented fully. Isn't that wonderful? It seems like a small thing, but sometimes it leads to other conversations and get you moving again, so I don't know that's worth anything relative to this kind of conversation.

Guided

Surround yourself like with working groups where you've got people who have different lenses, different perspectives, your markup, marketing, communication person, and the person who's doing the data entry. All noodling through things together. I'm frequently the first person who has a horrible idea, but we're good at putting spaghetti on the wall to sort of work through it. See what sticks right? So there were two noodle references there and you know working through that together. I think you end up with some of the best solutions, but to the.

Specific point that Celeste put in, like when people go in and do things that they shouldn't. I think all of what we're saying also needs to be part of a conversation about permissions. An I think you need to protect people from themselves. You don't want to admit a student that you need to refuse, and so I think it's really important that you as an institution have a conversation about the level of risk, right. What's the right level of permissions that protects us in ways that we need and allows the kind of exploration or.

You know, you tell someone you great idea why don't you go play in clean slate? You know go play in the test instance, I'll give you the permission there 'cause I personally don't want to end up on the front page of the New York Times for releasing the long decisions.

Yeah, I actually remembered what it was and it's adopting a maybe not yet.

Answer Instead of no answer.

And that that could be significant, right? 'cause 'cause of the request are right? There's not a. It's not a hard shutdown, it's a I want to work with you, but we have to find the appropriate time, space, place, environment to do that and just your comment. It just generated a whole mother thought for me in in the idea of proof of concept.

Go ahead and build it, show me how it works. Let's work through it all over there.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean the best thing about Slate is I went from being a know person. People had great ideas and I told you I was duct taping banner and this other reporting tool and other things together. Slate turned me into a yes person but it's a yes but and there's maybe not yet like yes we can do this.

For the steps and that might you know the chess game strategy that's going to be 3 months down the road. That's a year two we need to do this. First we need to overhaul our org data set before we can. Have you know, these forms associated with our org contacts and. But I think in the permissions also give people a safe space where they know that they have boundaries that protect themselves. They may experiment more appropriately if you give them the space to do so. So yeah, test, test, test.

Egypt.

Hey, I do want to shout out. One thing I notice in the chat, if you aren't looking at it we mentioned before. There are community groups. The members of this community groups have posted lots of links so I would encourage you if you're looking for a group to join, there's there's the link to the groups and go do it. You know there's the. There's the traditional site Community Forum, which is fantastic.

But there's also like a Facebook group. There's. There's a slack channel. There's a couple other things like that.

Yeah.

Go do it. There's some good people out there that really will help you kind of work through these things and the other side of it in the theme of change management is they can often talk about you're here and you want to get here. What did that take? And to me that's just as important as the technical knowledge because the people side of this has to work too. You can just do technical things without people.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. And if you are looking for sort of a regional group, maybe you can see your area of the country called out. Go ahead and reach out in the Community forums. There will always be someone who can point you in the right direction or there's always another region of the country that's willing to take you in.

Right?

That was a great answer. I think we've just got time for one more question and this one is sort of. I don't know. It's kind of a guess of fun question of because we've all been using slate for quite a long period of time in different instances and so cross your sort of late career once one thing where the version one was just kind of like, OK, it's there. It's functional where your version two was something that you were the most proud of. You were able to handle those changes, kind of make something out of.

So then it started out just kind of like, alright.

Well, you ask the hardest question at the end.

Yeah.

I don't know. I think for me it's a hard way. At least I'm going to put that to other people. I have to think about that.

So I can give you a second to think of an answer by plugging that tomorrow we have two more sessions coming up. You can join me again if you're not sick of me at 1:00 o'clock to discuss the art of automations and you can also join my colleague Jordan at 2:00 o'clock for sourcing and tracking inquiries and applications.

So.

All Times Eastern standard and now.

Feel.

Lock

So Cody, you know my answer is not going to be some big gigantic portal or workflow. It's going to be, you know, back and you want it. Good old Conn College with you know when there was no documentation and it was just a weekly call and we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow, in the rain. And there were round keys right for your rounds and they slowly started to implement things like the rules editor.

And I created a round key Con now and I brought it with me to Wellesley. It's round key Wellesley where I set up a series of rules that said if you're an early decision candidate ET one candidate, and you have received a deferred decision.

You will have around key Con write our own custom field of E. D1. Defer and the same thing for 82 and we end up taking it. You could segment out a wait list, admit an what this did for me.

Every time I build a query.

And my team didn't want to see.

The median rolling commingled with our true yield writer, Edie defers and our regular decision students, and maybe she didn't even want to see the wait list, admits 'cause. They're pretty high yield. One for one. I just used round kikan, right or now? Round key Wellesley, it seems so simple, but the rules editor set the field, and it saved me. It's kind of like name that tune ****. I can name that tune in five notes. Well, if I can name it in two, right? If I can use app period active in my round key?

Automated, just by a little bit of rules, editor sophistication and make my life easier for queries and reports and everything else under the sun. Like to me like that's a super proud sleep moment.

You took my moment. Yes, that's what I was going to say too, like using like in the first year. You tend to put rules in where you specify the specific year an if you can do it, you know. So we did that and it was fine. But then when we did our cycle prep the next year we realized what if we hook it up to the active period and we were whatever schools where you could do that. You can't do that in every case. That was like a huge deal and like.

Not let me down the road if I can write rules that I will never ever have to touch again and I don't know if that's maybe fits into the spirit of this, but it's the same idea that it's like Generation One was we got it. Done it with the work. That generation was elegant. I mean to me the goal is elegance. You want elegance in your site setup, so be able to do exactly what you want to do with the minimum number of steps. So that's how I would define it at least.

I know that we're on time, so I'll I'll spare everybody my.

My experience, but along the same lines of really just it, it's taking the littlest things and making them just a little bit easier, a little bit better.

It makes it makes all the difference in the world.

Absolutely thank you all so much. This has been a fabulous discussion. It was truly an honor to get to facilitate and just listen to the three of you talk. You know, it's something that we could have talked about. Like all day, several days, but I appreciate you taking just this hour. Thank you everyone who joined us today and will see you on the next session.

See everybody.

I have none.

Tierra