Posts by Mike

There's a lot of Skills Funding Agency data freely available of the web - much of it derived from the individualised learner record (ILR).

Microsoft Power BI is a good tool for making sense of what can be quite complex data. It's straightforward to build simple interactive visualisations that highlight patterns in the data and make it easier to spot trends. And sharing Power BI dashboards is also easy - at the moment Microsoft lets you share dashboards via a public url for free.

Musgrave Analytics and SkillsLogic have been working together to develop a state of the art performance management framework for Together Housing Group. The end result is a set of dashboards that gives all staff across the Together Housing Group a consistent view of the the numbers that are used to track performance.

Birmingham Changing Futures Together is a city wide project that aims to support people with multiple needs. It's coordinated by Birmingham Voluntary Services Council and brings together a network of supporting agencies who together will deliver joined-up targeted support to more than 1000 clients.

Our experience at SkillsLogic is that there are two broad categories of bespoke software, each with their own challenges.

We've made good use of Google Charts in our development of the new Staff Individualised Record (SIR) data collection and reporting system for The Education and Training Foundation.

Extending my simple timesheeting dashboard so that I could report on staff utilisation by month was a good way to start to use measures in Power BI Desktop. What I wanted to get to was a chart that showed the percentage of each person's time being spent on chargeable work each month.

From time to time SkillsLogic is asked to help out on a software development project that isn't going to plan. Most of these projects seem to get into trouble for one or more of the following reasons:

Power BI is Microsoft's powerful new data analytics and visualisation solution. Power BI comes in two parts - a cloud based service that makes it easy to share dashboards and Power BI Desktop, a free desktop application for building more sophisticated interactive reports and dashboards. Power BI is low cost - there's a completely free version and the Pro version costs $9.99 per user per month.

SkillsLogic's project portfolio includes both small developments that might take one developer just 2 or 3 weeks and much larger multi-developer projects that are delivered in phases over many months. Our biggest software development projects are long term commitments that last several years (and include both ongoing technical support and hosting). It is possible though to give some examples of the kind of work we do together with ballpark figures. The cost of bespoke software development varies - by definition it's bespoke - but these examples should give you some idea of the likely cost of your project.

The post-16 area reviews are part of the government's plan to restructure FE and sixth form colleges. The idea is to make post-16 providers more financially stable and efficient. Providers are going to be encouraged to collaborate more - that could mean more shared services and in some instances, college mergers.