With Phase I: Preparation complete, you’ve

• established your Slate team,

• gotten Slate Certified, and

• reviewed your current processes.

Now, on to Phase II: The Roadmap.

What is the Roadmap?

The Slate Roadmap is the recommended order of operations for building out admissions operations in Slate. We’ve designed it to both foster your understanding of Slate and to grow your operational capacity, one step at a time.

How to use the Roadmap

More than 2,000 institutions have used this standard roadmap to develop their implementation project plan, build operational capacity, and transition admissions processes into Slate.

These are the strategies we’ve found to be most effective for implementing clients:

Use the implementation checklist

Our sample implementation checklist mirrors the Roadmap and condenses it into a single document, which you can also download as a spreadsheet.

📖  Further reading: Implementation checklist article

📁 Download: Implementation checklist spreadsheet

Make the Roadmap your own

• Triage the list. What’s mission critical for you? What can be put on hold while you get more familiar with Slate tools? While we’ve drawn from years of experience implementing schools to arrange the Roadmap items, it is just a guide: your situation and needs are unique.

• Focus on building out essential operations first. Look for opportunities to improve operational efficiency using the data-based automatic processes in Slate.

• Add custom requirements as necessary. Throughout the Roadmap, we link to documentation that lets you explore lesser-known Slate features that happened to not make the cut as “mission critical”— but what’s mission critical to you may be different than for others.

✨ Stay flexible. As you learn more about the capabilities of Slate and of your team's own, dates and goals can change.

Follow along with Action Items

• ▶️ Action Items in the Roadmap describe a task to be completed and link you to articles that will walk you through these tasks.

• Many Action Items involve simple customizations of pre-configured objects that have been created for you. Others will walk you through the creation of new objects.

• Your database will have different pre-configured objects depending on your institution type. We call out where there are differences between the 4-Year Model and the 2-Year / Community College Model databases. If you see something in the other database model that you’d like in yours, we link you to documentation that lets you create it.

Keep up the tempo

• Set due dates to stay on track. Project due dates should reflect a balance between your implementation goals and a careful review of significant variables, such as the size of your team, the complexity of your operations, and competing priorities.

• Don't miss the forest for the trees. While you get to work building out your next operation, one process at a time, evaluate how those disparate processes work together.

• Edge cases can wait. When building out complex operations, like the application or the Reader, concentrate on creating a process that will work for the majority of your students.

• Come back to it later. You can always put together a simple administrative solution during your first year in Slate. Come back to the highly-specific for when you have more time and experience.

• Maintain momentum. Distractions and competing priorities are inevitable in a busy admissions office. Keeping your focus on good project management (rather than any given piece of functionality) will help you stay on track.

Ask questions in the Slate Community Forums

Visit the Slate Community for practical implementation advice specific to your circumstances.

Specifically, check out the Admissions and Enrollment forum. Then, from the Product Area list, select Database Setup.

Here, you’ll also find the schedule for Community Conversations and regular office hours with the Client Success Team.

👥 Check out the Slate Community!

Support your Slate team and steering committee

• Meet regularly. Discuss your implementation's progress and the team's interdependence, especially if team members are working on distinct operations at the same time. Use your Roadmap to support collaboration.

• Keep a communications open with your steering committee. Leverage your steering committee to help make strategic decisions quickly and overcome institutional resistance to change. Clarify competing priorities with your steering committee.

• Grow the team. As you work, identify the early-adopters ready and willing to try something new and bring them aboard your team or steering committee.

Evaluate your completed projects and iterate

Your first project provides a chance to develop good project management habits. As you begin developing additional functionality in Slate, draw on the lessons learned.

Take a second look at your project plan, and modify it if necessary.

Questions to ask your team

• Did we complete the appropriate sections in the Fundamentals of Admissions and Enrollment?

• Do we understand your data requirements completely?

• Does our plan need more detail, or less?

• Are our due dates too ambitious, or too cautious?

Test and troubleshoot

While we encourage you to build functionality in your production environment, refreshing your test environment gives you freedom to activate and evaluate new configurations and the resulting record transactions, especially with rules and data imports, and outgoing communications.

✨ Tip: Move select objects from your test environment to production using Suitcase.

Next: Roadmap Stage 1: Slate essentials

With these best practices in mind, let’s dive into the first stage of the Roadmap: the Slate essentials.

➡️ Next: Step 1: Slate essentials