Onboarding

Congratulations, your program has been set up and is ready for use! In order to successfully deploy myTIPreport within your program, we recommend that you follow a few simple steps:

1. Consider running a pilot.
2. Make sure everyone has access to myTIPreport.
3. Introduce myTIPreport to your department at a meeting.
4. Send a rollout email.
5. Build Momentum

Let’s take a quick walk-through through each of these tasks.

Consider running a pilot

Many programs who are new to myTIPreport run a brief pilot to work out any kinks before taking it to the entire program. A pilot is good for identifying two things:

1. Issues or Challenges that many people have when using the software. While we think we've worked out most of these issues over the years, we understand that the product will never be perfect. If there are issues that multiple people in your program hit, please let us know. These are generally the type of issues that we'll be able to remedy quickly with improvements to the app or web site.
2. Best Practices or FAQs that you can proactively communicate to the larger group when you roll out to the entire program. After you run your pilot, ask your pilot members what they'd wish they known at the start of the pilot that they now know after being part of the pilot. You'll want to include these learnings to the larger group.

It absolutely isn't necessary to run a pilot and many programs have been successful without running one first - so if you'd rather just rollout broadly from the beginning, feel free to do that.

If you choose to run a pilot, we generally recommend the following:

1. Choose 5-10 faculty members and 2-6 learners who will be working closely with each other. This is just a guiding principle - feel free to include more or less people as you see fit.
2. Run the pilot for 2-4 weeks. This should give your program enough time to identify any issues. We don't recommend going longer than a month because most issues are discovered before that time. Also, feel free to cut your pilot short if you find that everything is working well after two weeks.
3. Walk through the rest of the items below with your pilot group. It will be a good test run of the same things you'll do when rolling out to the larger program.

Make sure everyone has access to myTIPreport

Everyone who'll be participating in the feedback process needs to be provisioned in myTIPreport. This can be done by administrators via the "admin" section of the website. Help topics for this work can be found here.

When users are added they'll receive emails with instructions on how to access the site and the apps. These emails will contain temporary passwords (unless we've configured Single-Sign-On for your institution). Given that, we recommend adding users close to the time that the rollout will happen so that they don't lose their access email. However, even if they do lose the email, it's easy to get them connected.

Introduce myTIPreport to your department at a meeting

Taking 5-10 minutes at a Grand Rounds or M&M conference to introduce myTIPreport to everyone is highly recommended. At that meeting, at the very least you'll want to:

1. Get everyone to install the app and log in. This information is saved in the app so future logins are a breeze.
2. Let everyone know who's going to drive the interactions and how often you expect those to happen.

The goal of this meeting is to jump-start participation. We'd recommend reading our full article on increasing participation to make sure you're set up for success. If you don't have time to read the full article right now, one important thing to note is that your new program comes with a default "requirement" for learners to request or complete 4 evaluations per month. If you'd like to change that, check out our page on "citizenship" features.

Another good idea for this meeting is to have everyone do a fake evaluation. A great way to accomplish this is to do the following:

1. Before the meeting create a dummy learner and a dummy teacher.
2. At the meeting, when everyone has logged in using their accounts, have the faculty members perform an evaluation on the fake learner and have the learners request an evaluation from the fake teacher.
3. After the meeting, deactivate the dummy learner and the dummy teacher accounts.

Send a rollout email

After the departmental meeting, we encourage program directors to send a rollout email to the teachers and learners to increase awareness and generate excitement. In this mail, it's good to include instructions for downloading the app and logging in, and who to contact if they hit issues in case they missed the meeting.

Build Momentum

It's fairly common to see your program get off to a strong start and then slowly tail off after 4-6 weeks pass. A number of programs have found it useful to reiterate the importance of feedback and this new process once a month for the first 2-3 months after initial rollout. If you're using the automatic competitions built into myTIPreport, replying to the end-of-competition emails is an easy way to both recognize the people who are doing a good job participating and to reemphasize the importance of sending feedback on a regular schedule.

Good luck with your rollout!