Workplan 4 – Managing courses and checklists

Here comes the newest version of our resource management system – Workplan!

At SIMU, we are teaching over 130 courses this academic year. This is a volume that requires non-trivial organization. And because SIMU's goal is to be modern, we have abandoned Excel and created our own application to organize our teaching.

We launched the first version in spring 2023. We called the app Workplan - it's used for work planning. Its main purpose was to allow the management to assign technicians to individual lessons and thus define responsibilities for lesson preparation, lesson attendance, lesson harvesting, and trainer care.

The year has come and gone, and I am happy to report that the Simulation Center team is now familiarizing itself with the latest version, whose main new feature is the management of (not only graduate) courses. Unlike faculty teaching, which is automatically loaded into Workplan from the university schedule, courses are scheduled manually and in greater detail.

Course management

So far, we have only needed to assign a responsible technician to regularly recurring classes. However, in the new version we have introduced the possibility to assign roles to people for courses. The reason is that preparing a course is not about one or two people, but about the whole team fulfilling their roles. We need an administration, a team of AV/IT technicians for the preparation, from the team of technicians a senior technician is also chosen to be responsible for the overall preparation of the course. Everyone has a role and through Workplan they know it.

Moreover, the new version brings one more major functionality, which is kind of the reason why we didn't see it until the spring.

Documents and checklists

Have you also found that preparing lessons without checklists is stressful? We do, which is why we've introduced checklists for a lot of repetitive tasks. Course preparation is then probably the most extensive. After all, it starts several months in advance by announcing the date, collecting participant applications, and culminates in one or two days, but these are prepared a week in advance.

SIMU organises a lot of these courses and therefore it is a good idea to help yourself with documentation. We now have the opportunity to consolidate paper checklists, Microsoft Planner lists and Atlassian Jira assignments into one place. Into Workplan.

Simple documents allow us to create reusable checklists that responsible people fill out. For example, they fill them out on their mobile phones. The aim is to ensure that nothing is forgotten and that the learning is of the desired quality and error-free. However, by consolidating all the tasks in one place we have gained another huge advantage - collective awareness and overview of the status of all the individual courses.

Workplan 4 brings a lot of additional, yet hidden, features that set the stage for the new features of subsequent versions. In the meantime, though, we'll have to take a closer look at the mobile version of the app.