Madison School District of Phoenix  

Customer service

Customer service has been terrific. We have had a longstanding relationship with Qwest, and so we knew before the project ever started that we had resources at our disposal when we needed them. Our account services team is very responsive; they've also been able to help us with some of the eRate application process in terms of helping us understand what needed to be done on a specific timeline, and they're very thorough; we get responses when we need them.

On the technical support side, I have to say that Qwest has also been very responsive on that. We have an 800 number that we have access to 24x7 when we have any kind of an issue with connectivity or anything related to the equipment that is being supported on site by Qwest. We have very--a track record of very quick turnaround and on-site support when we need it; a good example of that happened last summer when the central Phoenix area experience a fairly large power outage, and that affected four of the sites in the Madison School District including our district office, which means that our telephone and network communications were down for about eight hours on a school day, so you can imagine the issues that instantly created with communication not only within the district, but also with parents and media who were anxious to find out whether school was open or closed or whether they needed to go pick up their child--so we had to scramble to get some communication established to all of the key stakeholders.

One of the things that we were able to do right away is to have Qwest help us implement some emergency POTS lines--just plain old telephone lines--to our sites and to the district office so that our main numbers were re-routed to those lines and allowed us to maintain some level of communication to people using telephone numbers that they would normally dial.

The implementation/installation

In short, it went very well. We had high hopes of completing the entire project within a 12-month time span, and that meant going from beginning to walk the sites to signing off on the project--that was our goal was to get it done in 12 months, and that was for eight schools plus two other sites. And these are sites where we had not established a connection to fiber optic--we had not established a fiber optic connection to Qwest at almost all of these locations, so that meant in some cases trenching between the building to the meet point on the street or figuring out some other alternative way to bring that fiber into the site. So that was a major challenge because you have to get involved with city ordinances and you have to have approval for doing those types of digging prior to doing that. So we learned very quickly that there are a lot of details to implementing a project this size, and we were able to do it; we were able to accomplish it all in 12 months.

We did have some issues; we had to change gears mid-course in a couple of instances where we determined we would not be able to go through a particular piece of parking lot or playground in order to run the fiber, so in one instance we actually ended up doing that connection via an above-ground cable.

The Qwest project manager was excellent at communicating with us the issues as they came up; we had regular team meetings that involved myself, our facilities management director, and the school principal or whomever needed to be in the loop in terms of how that project was going to be impacting their campus.

Some of the bumps were beyond our control, so sometimes it took longer than we would've liked to get the city to approve a permit or something like that, so we had to be able to be flexible as to where we were working at any particular time. We may have to shift work from one campus to another based on that, so we had to adjust timelines, we had to communicate that out to our stakeholders, that the project was changing. But all in all, it was very successful and we met our goal.

Measurable benefits

One of the things that comes to mind right away is the fact that we've been able to reduce the amount of technical support that we have to spend time and financial resources on, and I'll give you a couple of examples. By centralizing a lot of our applications, that means that we don't have to support those on the client end; basically, if they have a Web browser and a good connection, they're in, and so that eliminates a very significant amount of technical support right there. We're able to consolidate some of the hardware that we have to purchase and support--you know, for example, I mentioned our library automation system or our student attendance system; those all used to be client-based, and if you go back far enough they were paper-based. You know, the student attendance is critical because that's how districts receive their funding, based on student attendance, so that data is absolutely mission critical, and so not only having it in a timely fashion, but in an accurate fashion. We've been able to improve that by moving away from a paper-based manual solution; you know, you all remember raising your hands or the teacher doing a head count--well, now they do that on a computer and it gets uploaded to a centralized database which then in turn gets reported to the state of Arizona, all electronically. So we've reduced the amount of error in that, which means we can accurately count our attendance, which in turn means that we're getting funded at the level that we should be getting funded at.

By reducing the amount of hardware we're supporting at the end of our network, we are able to centralize and reduce the number of servers for a lot of our applications; whereas our library automation system required eight servers--one at the district office and one at each site--now we're supporting one server, and so, you know, instead of spending $100,000 to purchase eight new servers, I spent $10,000 for one centralized server.

You can also look at the return on investment for the labor costs; we're reducing the labor costs. You know, like everybody, we're really limited in the amount of human resources that we're able to have as an organization, so anything that we can reduce in terms of technical support, that means we can increase the support that's happening inside classrooms, so teachers and students are not waiting as long for technical support for computer classrooms or for other learning applications that're running on our network.