We were commissioned to work with one of the UK’s leading School Inspection providers to discuss the development of a bespoke online school inspection and data management system. The project brief focused on the capture, tracking and reporting of data collected during the various stages of the school inspection cycle. During the initial fact-finding and planning phases of the project, we worked closely with the senior management team in order to understand their business, document all of their requirements and understand their internal processes.

We then prepared a detailed project plan outlining all expected outcomes, costs, deliverables, user training and system support. Built and programmed using our core Osiris platform, the bespoke database management system was developed and built over a 12-month period with regular meetings and remote discussions taking place to ensure the project was on schedule, to specification and to budget.

The inspection management system increased the efficiency of the entire inspection management process and reduced the massive amounts of manual administration required to manage the previous paper-based legacy system. On-going process improvements included access to remote users throughout the United Kingdom, disaster recovery processes, system backup procedures, security protocols, user authentication for remote access and time-saving solutions and functionality to further improve the efficiency of other business-critical areas of the organisation.

Project managed from start to finish, the bespoke inspection management system was accessed daily by hundreds of School inspectors and education consultants throughout the South East of England.  The cutting-edge system supplied daily data feeds to the Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) central database and significantly improved the efficiency of the company’s data capture, retrieval, storage and synchronization.

 “IceStar Media devised a superb system that underpinned the efficient and effective administration of a large amount of data, as well as communications, among staff that needed to access it at different levels.”

K Beck: Prospects