Stakeholder interview guide for school management, ERP, and SIS

Design the scorecard before demos

A scorecard should reflect the school’s decisions, not the order in which a vendor presents features. Define the context, phase-one workflows, users, campuses, calendar, data, must-have controls, acceptance tests, and commercial assumptions before responses arrive.

Separate requirements essential for safe operation from preferences that may be deferred. Give each criterion an owner and evidence standard.

Score observed workflow behavior

Ask vendors to show the same journeys: admissions to enrollment, student record to roster, fees to receipt and reconciliation, attendance or assessment to family visibility, and a correction or denied-access case.

Record whether behavior is available now, configurable, integrated, manual, roadmap, or unknown. A narrative answer without a reproducible test should not receive the same score as observed evidence.

• Workflow and exception fit
• Data quality, migration, and source-of-truth clarity
• Role, relationship, approval, publishing, and export controls
• Implementation, training, support, and continuity
• Security, privacy, suppliers, lifecycle, and commercial clarity

Use evidence with different weights

Weight a must-have workflow and a preference differently. Score evidence quality separately from capability. Record assumptions, exclusions, unresolved questions, and the consequence of a failure.

The U.S. Department of Education data governance checklist supports questions on quality, access, security, sharing, disposal, and monitoring. GOV.UK guidance recommends attention to data protection by design, minimum necessary data, access control, security, subprocessors, incident notification, and end-of-contract data handling.

Include implementation and total cost

Ask who performs discovery, data preparation, migration, configuration, testing, training, family communication, support, updates, incident response, exports, and deletion or return. Compare one-time, recurring, usage-based, growth, integration, payment, support, and internal capacity costs.

Tie every commercial assumption to a requirement. A low quote with major exclusions is not comparable with a complete quote.

Set decision and review gates

Before selection, require evidence for must-have workflows, permissions, data handling, support, and commercial assumptions. Before launch, require accepted migration, tests, training, communication, monitoring, and hold criteria.

Review at 30, 60, and 90 days using completion, quality, support, access exceptions, family experience, and the original outcome. A selection is a starting decision; the school should remain able to narrow, improve, or stop a phase.

Keep scores and evidence together, but do not let arithmetic hide a critical failure. A supplier with a strong total score may still be unacceptable if a must-have permission, privacy, recovery, or workflow test fails. Define non-negotiable gates before adding weighted preferences.

After selection, preserve the accepted baseline, assumptions, and unresolved risks. When scope changes, score the change against the same criteria and ask the affected workflow owners to confirm whether the original decision still holds.

Keep the final scorecard with the contract and implementation record so later reviewers can distinguish an accepted limitation from an untested assumption.

Apply the guidance to one school decision

Before approving this guidance for stakeholder interview guide for school management software, translate it into one school-specific decision record. State the workflow, roles, data fields, permissions, evidence, support route, academic-calendar constraint, and condition that would hold the next phase. Note which answer still depends on product configuration or local policy.

Run the decision with controlled data and the people who will operate the workflow. Record what was observed, what remains unknown, who owns the unresolved item, and when it will be reviewed. Revisit it after launch at 30, 60, and 90 days. Keep the record beside the acceptance tests, support guidance, and change log so later reviewers can see why the school proceeded, narrowed scope, or held the next phase.