Thursday, 18th of December

The final day of the Rollout saw students do some final clean-up, as well as going on a scavenger hunt to collect all the old ink-jet and individual Laser printers from areas around the school (part of our Print distribution project).

We finished up witha  presentation, giving each student a “goodie” bag, including some free gifts from our sponsors, HP, Sophos and Trident, and of course, the thing they all wanted, an 8GB iPod Nano!

To sum up, this years Rollout was a tremendous success, and thanks to all the ICT staff for their hard work not only during the week, but in preparation for the event!

Tx,

Monday, 15th – Wednesday, 17th of December

The Rollout Team powered on, refreshed after the weekend which proved to be a great way to keep them running at full steam for the whole 5 days.

To add a little fun to the rollout, we divied the teams between 3 areas that needed new computers installed, Rm 45, The new ICT lab and Visual Communications – each area had the smae number of computers, and created a competition between the 3 groups – 1 of which was staff only! The prize, each student from the winning team could take home an old PC of their choice. The winning team was awarded, not just for who completed their area the fastest, but each machine had to be set up on a spotlessly clean area, cable tied and read for imaging – all up to my standards (pretty high)! Well done to one of the student teams that beat the “All Staff” team by 20 minutes!

On Wednesday we organised a tour of the completed Rollout for some select staff – the tour kicked off with a intro by me, then the students lead the staff through all the areas of their hard work. The students were AMAZING, taking the lead, pointing out the features of the new computers and thoroughly impressing all that attended!

We finished off with a Pizza lunch for the students and invited guests before finishing up for the day.

 

Friday, 12th of December

Amidst pouring rain, out Rollout teams worked a solid day to complete the Year 9 centre, then turned their attention onto the first two of our ICT labs.

By the end of Friday, Rm 22 and 23 are 90% complete and should be finished off first thing Monday morning.

Room 23 under construction.

 

Finishing off Room 22 – Quality control on the cable ties!

Room 22, starting to take shape!

Now that looks “Slick!”

 

Thursday, 11th of December

 Thursday started with a team meeting at 8:45am, where students were welcomes to the Official 2009 ICT Rollout. They were issues with their Rollout ID badges and divided into pairs and assigned a STaff member. After going over the Rollout Schedule, some basic Quality Control team, and the usual brief with dealing with tricky situations, teams began their allocated Rollout moves.

First major section was the Junior school.

A production line was set up on-site in Year 9

The Senior Library

The students needed a little reminding of how to do Cable-ties…

 At the end of Day 1 of the Official ICT Rollout, the teams have moved far faster than originally thought!

Tx

Burgess

 

  

Tuesday and Wednesday, 9th and 10th of December

Over Tuesday and Wednesday ICT staff were extremely busy putting the finishing touches onto our SOE, moving some computers to assist in the Rollout, and generally finalising all of the outstanding items that needed to be finished for the first day of the Staff/Student Rollout.

Monday, December the 8th

It’s 8:30 on the first official day of the rollout, and yep, you guessed it, Hurdle #1!

It seems that the “mini-skip” we have ordered has been delivered to the wrong location within the School - not too bad, except it is blocking the areas the trucks will be using to unload the Pallets into storage!

Hopefully there is enough room on the road to manoeuvre the trucks to get into a tight spot and enough room between the bin  and a very large rock!

After a quick call to the Operations Department, the skip was moved, and the delivery arrived.

Finding secure storage space in our school for nearly 600 boxes proved a little difficult, but after a little rearrangement, all of the boex are asafely stored and waiting for our Rollout to begin.

After confirming that all the boxes were delivered we have headed out and purchased all the kits for each Rollout Team.

Each team will have 1 ICT staff member and 2 students, and their kits are comprised of :

• Trolley [View]
• Bucket
• 200+ cable ties
• Side-cutters
• Packaging knife
• Electric Screwdriver (for putting together the Integrated Work Stands)
• Cleaning wipes

Tomorrow the machines that are being removed from the labs to be installed in some of the other areas of the School are being re-imaged, ready for the Rollout to start on Wednesday/Thursday.

Friday, December the 5th

Last working day before the Rollout. Still have a few items to work out, but mainly picking up tool kits, cable-ties, and cleaning products for our teams – that can wait until Monday morning.

Spoke to Head of Technical Services and he has been working extremely hard to finalise the Rollout Schedule – without his brilliant work none of this will come together.

He’s also confirmed that the 2009 Software image is ready to go for the new schedule, and is in the last stages for the other machines. One of the most important aspects of this rollout is to replace computers that are over 4 years of age and to reduce the number of hardware schedules we have (over 20 at the middle of the year). Looks like we’ll be down to 10 or so by January!

 

Thursday, December the 4th

Couriers have confirmed delivery time of 11:00am (they rang an apologised that it wouldn’t be 9:00am as requested, apparently there are so many pallets that they need two trucks.

They also came and did a “drop-off” site survey to ensure that they could deliver the computers exactly where we needed them!

Pre-December

Organisation for the Rollout began in July when ICT staff conducted a hardware map of the school to establish the age and location of our computers. Since that point, we placed the initial order in late September (to guarantee delivery on the 8th of December) and have undertaken a details Project Management framework to ensure that the Rollout will run smoothly.

We have invited 8 student to participate in this years Rollout, and have organised withsomeof our suppliers to give each of them a small “thank you” bag of promotional “stuff”. They will also receive a reference and certificate for their work. This team, placed into pairs and teamed with an ICT staff member will be responsible for the installation of all the new machines, the shifting of current devices and the decommissioning of older computers.

The delivery is scheduled for 11:00am on this Monday (the 8th), and this Blog page will record the events that transpire over what will inevitably be a very memorable event in the life of our School.

Introduction

While many Schools and organisations have annual Rollouts of ICT equipment, this year marks the first large scale Rollout for my School. In the past, the largest Rollout of PCs was around 45 (not small really), and typically involved changing over computers in one lab.

This year, we will be undertaking the installation of 197 new computers and completing over 300 individual computer moves! Of these 197, 17 are HP Small Form Factor PCs with 24″ Acer monitors (to match a current intallationin Art) and the remaining 180 are all HP Ultra Slim FF with a 19″ LCD on an integrated Work Stand.

The USFF and 19″ combo was selected as our base model for future years for their compact use of space and ease of movment. As these HPs are still highly spec’ed, they willperform all of the tasks our students will throw at them (including Digital Video). Monitors larger that 19″ would take up too much space in labs and were really an over-kill!