Project Plan

This page describes a project plan for project managers and alike that want to start using Schoolyear AVD in their organization. It is meant to help you run a successful Schoolyear AVD implementation project.

Schoolyear AVD is an integration between the Schoolyear Safe Exam Workspace and your self-managed Azure infrastructure. While Safe Exam Workspace is a SaaS solution, this service does not cover your own Azure infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be configured and actively maintained by yourself.

The Schoolyear AVD integration can best be considered as a tool that will help you set up an internal service for your education department. However, that does mean that you need a team to operate this internal service. Depending on your needs and organization, this may be a one-person operation, an IT team, or even an outsourced team at an IT service provider.

The implementation project described requires various tasks to be performed by internal stakeholders, even if some operational duties are outsourced to an IT service provider. This includes organizational aspects like setting up the service team and piloting, as well as technical tasks that require internal approvals or elevated permissions. These responsibilities typically remain within the organization and cannot be delegated to external parties.

A Schoolyear AVD implementation is done in three stages:

1. Gathering a Service Team: Setting up a team of IT personnel that implements and operates the service.
2. Implementation: A three-phase undertaking: technical implementation, pilot, and a final go/no-go meeting.
3. Continuous Operations: Keeping the service operational, responding to incidents and advancing the service to meet new education requirements.

Stage 1: Service team and project kick-off

The first order of business is gathering a service team. They will use the Schoolyear AVD integration to provide an internal service to your education department. The Service Team is the owner of this service and is responsible for setting it up and proactively maintaining it.

The Service Team needs to cover three key roles:

1. Azure infrastructure management
2. Image development and maintenance
3. Incident response and key user support

IT personnel can typically fulfill these roles as part of their existing responsibilities. You can peek at the list of service controls to get an idea of the workload for each role.

Caution

Incident response requires an on-call rotation to ensure quick response times. The most critical time for incident response is during exam deployment periods, which typically occur 3-4 hours before exam start times. Having rapid response capabilities during these windows is essential, as a failed deployment means a canceled exam.

Service team scenarios

The Service Team requires technical personnel experienced in Azure infrastructure and Windows image management. While most IT organizations possess these skills internally, some may choose external assistance.

We commonly observe the following implementation approaches:

• A fully internal Service Team leveraging existing organizational expertise to implement and operate the service.
• A hybrid approach where an internal Service Team receives guidance from an experienced consultant during implementation, followed by training to assume complete ownership.
• Full outsourcing as a managed service to an IT service provider.

Caution

When outsourcing the management of your Schoolyear AVD service, it is crucial that the service provider assumes responsibility for the service and not only performs specific, narrowly scoped, tasks. We advise against outsourcing specific tasks. Specify performance criteria instead.

The Technical Implementation Guide and Service Controls documents provide detailed task specifications, such that IT service providers can make an estimation of work on which to ground their pricing. These documents also provide you with a guideline for evaluating quotes. A managed service contract would have to at least include the tasks and duties outlined in these two documents for both your beta and production environment.

Schoolyear does not train, certify, or partner with external IT service providers and cannot vouch for their quality.

Project kick-off

Once you have your Service Team together, reach out to Schoolyear Support to plan a project kick-off. Make sure to invite the Service Team, the Key Users, and other stakeholders to this meeting. A Schoolyear onboarding specialist will join, helping everyone get up to speed on the product and resources available during the implementation project. After the meeting, we will assign the required AVD Admin roles to the Service Team and enable the Schoolyear AVD features within your tenant.

Stage 2: Implementation

During the implementation stage, the service team needs to work together with the IT stakeholders and key users to set up the service and get it ready for the first exams.

The implementation is split up in three phases:

1. Technical implementation
2. Pilot
3. Final go/no-go meeting

Phase 1: Technical implementation

The Service Team needs to perform the technical implementation of the service for both your beta and production environment. They should follow the Technical Implementation guide for each environment.

During the Technical Implementation the Service Team needs to work together with various stakeholders within your organization, such as:

• The Azure, Entra, DNS, and SSL certificate admins
• Your Change Approval Board
• Your Schoolyear key users

There are several parameters in the technical implementation that you need to define for your Service Team. Make sure to discuss these with your service team to scope the technical implementation.

• Which exam environments and applications to configure: The key-users should define the exam environments to set up and their applications and settings.

• Whether MFA needs to be disabled for students during the exam: If MFA is enabled for students, the Service Team needs to work with your Entra/identity admins to make an MFA exception for during exams.

• Need for ChromeOS support: ChromeOS devices require an isolated exam network setup by your IT Network team if one does not already exist.

• Service availability: Does your service need to be available 24/7 or only during working hours? Do you also need availability in the morning, or is it ok to only schedule exams with Schoolyear AVD in the afternoon? This is important because a member of the Service Team needs to be on-call while exams deploy. That means that exams in the morning require availability outside working hours or much longer deployment times.

Towards the end of the technical implementation, the Service Team should sit down with the key-users for a functional test of the configured exam environments. The key users need to check whether these exam environments meet their requirements and are ready for use.

Readiness check

Before organizing real exams, we strongly recommend scheduling a Schoolyear AVD Readiness Check. In a 60–90 minute technical review, one of our experts will assess your implementation of the Service Controls to surface and prevent common issues.

Schedule your readiness check by emailing support@schoolyear.com. The readiness check is complimentary and does not count toward your yearly support credits.

Caution

This check does not certify the implementation. It helps you avoid common implementation issues before they affect live exams. If the implementation or ongoing management of the service is outsourced to a third party, this check should not be used as an acceptance of the work and should not absolve the third party of their responsibilities.

Phase 2: Pilot

After your readiness check, and before production use, you should have a pilot phase. This pilot is for the service team and the education department to practice for the real exams. You also want to make sure everything is ready to go before you schedule any real exam.

You should organize a few pilot exams with actual students, without the outcome of the exams being of any consequence. Consider whether it would be acceptable if these pilot exams were to fail completely.

Our primary recommendations for conducting pilot exams are:

• Before organizing a gathering of students to do a pilot exam, first conduct a thorough dry-run using a dummy student account. This will help identify and resolve any potential issues before involving actual students.

• Ensure pilot exam failure is acceptable. Running into unforeseen issues during initial pilots is common and expected. This is actually the purpose of pilot testing. Verify that exam failure can be accommodated without serious consequences.

• Schedule pilots in afternoon time slots. This allows your service team to investigate and resolve any deployment issues or technical problems during standard business hours.

• Based on the results from the pilot, make any technical or organizational adjustments you need to make this service ready for the first exams.

Phase 3: Go/no-go

Before starting to use Schoolyear AVD for real exams, we advise doing a go/no-go meeting with Schoolyear. In this meeting, you can review the topics that came up during the pilot(s) and the readiness check to make sure they are resolved.

Reach out to support@schoolyear.com to schedule this meeting and make sure to invite the key users and the service team.

Stage 3: Continuous operations

Once your first exams are running, the project transitions into an ongoing service. The focus shifts from one‑time setup to predictable, well‑managed operations that keep the service reliable, secure, and aligned with educational needs.

The Service Team owns the service and must be proactive in the management of it. The Service Controls describe a list of operations that must be ensured by them. In additional to the periodic maintenance work, an important job of the Service Team is to provide incident response and support to the key users. Notably, the incident response requires active monitoring and an on-call schedule.

From this point on, keeping the service available is the responsibility of the Service Team. However, we do suggest doing a review meeting with the Service Team at least once a year.