CEnet Vendor Management Office
This week we place a spotlight on CEnet's Vendor Management Office (VMO). The VMO was established to oversee all aspects of CEnet's procurement function and the management of key supplier relationships. It takes an active role in controlling the cost of services, driving service excellence and mitigating against the risks involved in procuring a range of highly technical solutions.
One of the VMO's primary responsibilities is procurement governance. A strong governance framework has been established, including both policy and process. The VMO ensures the market is tested regularly, suppliers are treated fairly and equitably, and tender processes are both impartial and transparent.
CEnet understands the value that can be delivered through relationships with key suppliers. By leveraging purchasing power, CEnet achieves significant commercial outcomes on behalf of its sixteen member dioceses. However, continuous monitoring and management is critical in ensuring long term success. The VMO oversees a schedule of Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR's) with key vendors enabling timely and meaningful discussions on performance and valuable information on future direction.
CEnet has recently held QBR's with two of its key vendors, TechnologyOne and Compass. Both meetings provided valuable insights into strategic direction and their respective technology roadmaps. The VMO has several upcoming meetings scheduled with other key vendors. Member dioceses are invited to contact CEnet if they are interested in taking part in these discussions or understanding more about CEnet's Vendor Management Office.
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CEnet Business Continuity Management Programme
During early 2020, CEnet reviewed and renewed its approach to Business Continuity Management. Key to this process was a four-stage BCM development method, focussing on Policy, Framework, Planning and associated Tools that are required for end-to-end management of business continuity events.
CEnet's BCM Framework enables CEnet to continue delivering critical business functions and its services following a disruptive event. It also builds high-level resilience in CEnet’s operational services when facing major planned and/or unplanned events.
The BCM programme was key in supporting and enabling CEnet's recent transition to working from home for all staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has further highlighted a programme of work to modernise artefacts that relate to the delivery of CEnet services. This includes service definitions, service portals, service-specific disaster recovery plans, and also ensuring that information surrounding CEnet’s business functions, and services is complete, readily accessible, and available to those that need it.
A BCM portal has been established at https://bcm.cenet.catholic.edu.au. Access to this portal is restricted, however it can be made available to members to support them in your own BCM activities.
For further information on CEnet's approach to BCM, please contact Ian Gregory (igregory@cenet.catholic.edu.au).
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Reflecting On Learning From Home
As schools across the CEnet membership are transitioning back to face to face learning, many are reflecting on what they have learned from the learning from home experience.
Teachers and students at Mary MacKillop Catholic College in the Diocese of Toowoomba have returned to face to face learning and teaching, but are keen to retain the insights gained from "e-learning". One such insight is the enthusiasm for the use of Lightboards in Prep and Secondary Mathematics classes while working with students who were learning from home.
A Lightboard is a sheet of glass that is "pumped full of light" and can be used for recording video-based teaching events. The Lightboard enables the person teaching to face toward their viewers, and whatever they are writing appears to float in front of them.
Interested in understanding how families found the initiative, the College conducted a sample survey of parents. Below is one of the survey questions and the response.
Prep Bilbies has maintained 'traditional' homework as well as the lightboard. Which of these do you feel is more successful at communicating expectations and delivering core teaching?
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Want to know more about Lightboards? This one minute video is a good place to start.
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Semester Reports Using Compass During Learning From Home
A reflection from Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta on successfully delivering a modified Compass-based semester reporting solution to accommodate the very unusual circumstances during Semester One.
It may be difficult to remember right now, but there was once a time before COVID-19.
Semester reports were always going to be a challenge in these unusual times, not least because the audience for these reports, our wonderful parents and carers, had rather suddenly found themselves expending more school time with the reportees than our own teachers this semester.
This provided an excellent opportunity to ease our primary schools into using Compass for semester reports, using a simplified format. To enable this, CEDP staff took on the task of all configuration duties centrally, enabling schools to focus on supporting their teachers through the new experience of entering results into Compass. CEDP provided teachers with a simple one-page guide on how to do this.
At the configuration end, we made use of a custom (in-house developed) primary timetable app which is used daily to bulk synchronise timetables across all primary schools in the Parramatta Diocese. This was adapted to push in a new cross-year subject, “Semester 1”, enrolling students based on their homerooms in all our primary portals. This step took just a few minutes to sync to all of our schools.
From there, for schools that elected to use Compass, CEDP staff configured the “Semester 1” subject in a new reports cycle, adding two comment boxes and a tick grid. The first comment box was set up to record comments about three KLAs — English, Maths, and Religious Education — and each had its own section, rendering as a separate box. The tick grid was purposed to capture key attributes and traits, with the final comment box used for general teacher comments.
As all configuration was handled in this new single cross-year “subject” CEDP staff could skip the step of copying these attributes out to other subjects or year levels, enabling configuration of each portal in less than ten minutes. The report became an attractive one-page guide, a cover page and an introduction page which contained a letter of explanation for the different report format this semester.
Teachers have found this to be incredibly easy to handle as the 3 KLAs and general comments can be captured on a single entry grid. Some schools incorporated additional functionality, including input from the Insights module, with which we were happy to support them.
All up, this was a great introduction to Compass reporting for our schools and the ability to use the Compass structure to push out the new format was a significant time saver.
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Bulletin Archive
In case you missed the earlier editions of the CEnet Member Bulletin, the archived documents are available here.
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