Developing the LEAP Application (Leading Effective Academic Practice)
Role: Senior Business Analyst
The LEAP Application is a large, custom-developed IT product consisting of user interfaces and SSRS reports for six individual areas, four designed to calculate and display a teacher’s overall performance. It is a collaborative effort between district leaders, school leaders, teachers, members of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) and other stakeholder groups. It establishes a clear set of expectations to assess teacher performance, ensuring teacher support from school leaders.
I communicated across all stakeholder groups, ensuring collaborative consensus in the functionality that should exist, and developing business processes, user stories, requirements and UI designs for new features.
Project
2+ Years
Releases
14 Go-Live Implementations
Team
24+ Resources
“Sasha is an incredibly gifted BA. She learns quickly and seems fearless when it comes to projects. I feel her strongest attribute is her research. Her solutions are solid and clean and I would work with her any day.”
LEAP Application Student Growth Requirements
Link: Student Growth Requirements
The link above contains a section of a Student Growth requirements document I developed for the LEAP Application after the Colorado Senate updated requirements for teacher performance. The requirements document and UI design were created after many conversations and prototype reviews with business resources and teacher union representatives to ensure consensus, along with application developers and database administrators to confirm system capabilities.
Wireframe of the Student Growth Page from the Teacher-level perspective
The wireframe above is a snapshot of the Student Growth Page from the Teacher level perspective. The LEAP Application displays data on 3 Levels: Teacher, School and Network, and has 6 unique Cycles each calendar year that fall under End of Year (EOY) and Mid-Year (MY). All UI and calculation requirements take these 3 Levels and 6 Cycles into account.
What Was Accomplished:
Simplified: Created a single online source for teachers and leaders to track four different performance metrics that were previously accessed through multiple technological and non-technological (written) means; Developed LEAP Application-specific functionality to calculate all performance metrics and create a single LEAP Score; Provided an aggregated view for Principals and District leaders, only available in the LEAP Application.
Developed Internally: Functionality designed, developed and maintained by internal DPS resources, making future maintenance and adding features much more accessible. Functionality aligns with State standards and is in collaboration with the teacher’s union.
Standardized Processes: Introduced and standardized an Agile / Waterfall hybrid methodology in the DPS Department of Technology Services. During my time as Senior Business Analyst for the project, we completed 14 successful go-live implementations.