Presenting a school system to the parents' meeting

On 8 February 2020, in my final year (Level 5) at Musamvu TVET School, I stood up at the general parents' meeting and presented the upgraded version of the report system I had built in Excel.

This time it was a web application, and it did much more than reports.

From one feature to one system

The Excel tool solved report cards. But reports were only one part of how the school ran. Marks, discipline, permissions and fees were handled on paper and in separate Excel sheets that didn't talk to each other.

The web version brought these into one system:

• Collaboration between teachers, with dynamic user management, so each teacher had their own access.
• Marks distribution and report generation.
• Behaviour and discipline reporting.
• Student permissions management.
• Finance management, integrated with everything else.
• SMS notifications to parents.
• QR codes on documents, to identify what the system had produced.

I called it RASMS: Roger's Advanced School Management System.

The agreement

The meeting agreed that the school would use the software, and it went into use from that point. In return for the work, I would not pay school fees that year.

I was a student presenting to a room of parents and staff. Their decision to adopt the system was the biggest vote of confidence I had received.

Then everything stopped

Weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and studies paused. The system was ready, and the school it was built for was empty.

When we came back, RASMS faced a problem I hadn't designed for. That is the next part of this story.

What I took from it

Present to the people affected, not only the people in charge. Parents were the ones who would receive the SMS, the reports and the discipline notices. Showing them the system directly built support for it.

Integration is the product. Each module on its own was simple. The value was that marks, discipline, permissions and finance lived in one place with one set of users.

Plans meet reality. A pandemic was not in any requirements document. Building software means being ready to adapt when the context changes completely.