Why manual device setup is slowing down your entire school

What does the first week of school look like for your IT team? Imagine with me.

Scenario A:

Ahhh, the first week of school. A perfect time to be woken up softly by the birds and the kiss of a gentle breeze. After a little morning tai chi, you decide on a chai tea — who needs coffee when you’re this zen?

You spent your summer taking care of the odds and ends around your school, creating new accounts and getting your devices back to their baseline requirements. And from there, your automations took over. You end your day with a vinyasa and a smile.

And today, you listen to the placid rumbling of students screaming in the halls, devices with the right apps and accounts stuffed into their backpacks. Teachers start the lessons they planned. And there’s you, enjoying the white noise of a server room in solitude since no one needs your help (for now).

Scenario B:

School is in session. You spent all summer training. Repping out device resets. Chasing orphaned user accounts. Shredding old assets. Pushing around asset carts. Dialing in your coffee consumption rate. You know you’re as prepared as your regimen allowed you to be, but you still feel the dread in your throat that only comes when you think of your biggest opponent: students (insert Wilhelm scream here).

And indeed, mere moments into the first class of the day, your phone rings, someone knocks on the door, and an email pings your inbox, at the same time (how is that even possible). Suddenly you’re hit with a swarm:

• Students in 9th grade biology are forced to share devices because there aren’t enough. And 10th grade math classes can’t find the apps they need.
• Teachers can’t proceed with their planned lessons because their devices aren’t doing what they expected.
• School admins are running around, trying to find loaner devices.

And of course, your team is sweaty, tired and constantly falling behind.

How smoothly does your deployment run?

Yes, I know your day probably isn’t exactly like one of these two (gratuitous) stories. And the bulk of your work isn’t concentrated during summer break. But it’s true that how smooth your deployment runs is based on how automated it is. The more manual touches a device requires, the greater the chances of failure, for both the device and your sanity.

So, let’s find where these touch points are. For each stage in the deployment timeline, ask yourself:

• Who touches the device?
• What does this stage wait on?
• How many times does the device have to be handled?

Deployment timeline:

1. Devices ordered and received
2. Inventory and assignment
3. Enrollment and configuration
4. Apps, settings and security applied
5. Staging and distribution
6. First login and other first-week issues
7. Mid-year changes: new students, reassignments and repairs
8. Collection, refresh and retirement

Are you finding some potential bottlenecks? Thankfully, automation can smooth things out.

No touchy! Let your automations simplify your work.

Without automation, you’re repeating the same small tasks over and over again. Even if these need to get done, they likely aren’t the best use of your time.

Start by automating the most repeatable and predictable tasks. You’ll find gains quickly.

Enrollment

Manual enrollment can take a long time. If you’re powering on the device, connecting it to Wi-Fi, enrolling it into MDM, waiting on policies and so on, for every device, that’s a lot of time you could be spending in downward dog — I mean, working on more important tasks.

Instead, walk a group of teachers or students through their device enrollment. In the same amount of time, you’ll onboard way more devices than if you were setting it up yourself — without touching their device. Thanks, zero-touch deployment.

Baseline settings and apps

Enrollment is only part of the battle. Tying a device’s setup to the user logging in saves you both precious time. Instead of spending time trying to figure out the Wi-Fi, hunting for the apps they need or browsing distracting content, a student can have a Wi-Fi enabled device with the apps made for their grade level and subjects ready for access. And any harmful, distracting or irrelevant content is blocked so learning goes on as planned.

Repeatable fixes and updates

Oops, somehow half your third graders have already lost their chargers. Oops, staff keeps emailing you because they forgot their passwords over the summer. Teachers found a cool new app they want to use mid-year. A device was discovered behind a dusty locker and is two OS updates behind. A new student transfers in after a few months.

There are tasks that you know and expect, just due to the natural flow of tech use at your school. Even if all your devices are ready at the beginning of the year, they’ll eventually require maintenance. While not every maintenance task can be fully automated, you can give your users the tools to help themselves:

• Teachers can submit app requests for your approval.
• Students can download approved apps on their own with a self-service portal.
• Devices that are out of date get forced updates once they’re powered back on.
• Staff that forgot their passwords can reset it themselves without filing a ticket.
• New students get their devices set up with configurations that match their classmates who have been there since the start of the year.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of an automation that will find a lost charger. :(

Amplify IT’s impact in the classroom.

Like it or not, you can’t automate your job away. But automations like the ones above make your team’s and your users’ lives easier. If you remove yourself from the basics, you have more time to spend on the tasks that make learning better for your users:

• Extend devices’ influence on learning: add new teacher-requested apps and tools, empower teachers with classroom management tools, streamline logins with tools like single sign-on, meet learners’ needs with accessibility settings and responsibly roll out tools like generative AI
• Stay proactive, not reactive: plan refresh cycles ahead of time, keep a sustainable help desk inbox with automated tasks, and prevent or remediate potential issues before they become major problems
• Build strategy with school leaders: meet with curriculum and administrative leaders to integrate devices with a broader education strategy

In other words, you get time back to go beyond your baseline deployment and directly impact how students and teachers experience the classroom.

How are you (really) doing? Your workload reflects on the classroom.

How’s your school year going so far? Are doing sun salutations like my brother’s third graders in his music class? Or are you sitting like a shrimp at your computer screen? If you feel like your deployment is happily chugging along with your processes, your users are likely feeling that too — the fewer tickets and interruptions you get (hopefully) means that students and teachers are getting the secure and powerful devices they need to succeed.