Post-Mortem: What I learned Opening a Satellite School

A few years back, one of the colleges I worked for decided to expand by opening a satellite school. To the board of directors, this was the only way to make a school more equitable and more successful. They adopted the age-old mentality of “if you build it, they will come”. They were wrong.

If I had a week, I couldn’t list all the things wrong with this decision but I’ll summarize and stay focused on the planning and execution of launching this endeavor. The Satellite School (SS) was pitched with the premise that it would fulfill a few expectations of the Board of Directors (BOD) which were:

• Satisfy the needs of interested potential students in a city that wasn’t easily accessible to the parent school and didn’t have much competition from similar schools

• Be self-sustaining and not require substantial resources or money from the parent school (PS)

• Add opportunities for existing employees who could grow with the new SS where growth was more difficult at the PS.

• Be profitable / cost less to run

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. The school had a rough start, didn’t have enough support, and caused a moral slide of faculty and staff. So, what went wrong?

• The CEO ignored all warnings and request to reevaluate the location, scope, and timing of such a project.

• The school wound up having an abysmal number of students in the first several cohorts.

• The school was a beautiful facility, that was away from downtown and wasn’t easily accessible by public transit. It was in an industrial part of the city that you needed a car to get to or to get food for lunch. Students had a problem going to the school in the city they lived in.

• It wasn’t self-sustaining. It required staff, equipment, resources and management from the PS that wasn’t anticipated and there for, not budgeted. Staff who worked there had to drive an extra hour from the PS with little to no compensation.

• The budget wasn’t very accurate. Not enough research with the cost of hardware, faculty, and staffing compared to the number of students that would be required to make it sustainable.

Every project requires the management of 5 variables and this project didn’t successfully do any of them (Laureate, E., n.d.).

1. Time– The time was miscalculated for the project. The CEO acted as Project Manager (PM) and didn’t have enough research. In his defense, he was answering to the BODs which were bankers who knew nothing about education. The time to build out the facility was wrong and more expensive than originally thought. Classes were delayed and hiring was difficult.

2. Resources– the school took more resources from the PS than was ever anticipated. Faculty who had to teach at the SS had to have their classes at the PS covered. Hardware from the PS for one of the programs had to go to the satellite school and staff had to be shared. Because of its location, it was difficult to get to, making it less desirable for faculty and students.

3. Expertise– There was plenty of expertise in the seasoned faculty and staff, several who had opened schools before, but it went completely ignored. Communication was more of a need to know basis and was often not soon enough.

4. Quality– Quality suffered because of the lack of resources and planning. Experienced people were involved but improperly utilized. Shortcuts were made and in the end, the project wasn’t executed as it was envisioned.

5. Scope– Scope Creep was a major factor. There was a constant run of unexpected problems due largely to short-cutting and not sticking to the original plan.

This project was difficult because of the amount of restrictions and variables that were a constant influence such as the BODs, budget reductions, reworking miscalculations. The two biggest problems the PM had was a lack of research and communication. Had I been in his position, I would have had a much more thorough use of the ADDIE method and did research starting with an Analysis of:

Location– Instead of just a financial decision I would have looked much closer at transportation accessibility and nearby food accessible by walking in relation to the amount of time between classes.

Student Needs– A more complete study of students in that region who are more than just interested in this type of school and based the percentage of interest with comparable statistics of other schools that have been successful.

Communication– We had a huge number of seasoned SMEs that weren’t properly utilized. Most of the Scope Creep could have been prevented with communication and listen to the SME’s. Almost all of the SME’s warnings of what could happen did happen. What’s the point of having SME’s if you’re not going to listen to them? More surveys, and discussions with the SME’s who knew more about cost, hardware and even location of where the school should have been.

The Scope of the project– I would have defined a much more realistic scope of the project and suggested a more reasonable build out of fewer programs starting with the limited amount of resources.

Even with the restrictions that were somewhat unrealistic, I think the execution of the school could have gone much better. As it stands the school is still there but had to scale back from the original square footage and is still way under the number of students it should have to be successful.

Resources

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practitioner voices: Barriers to project success [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu