June 9, 2016

To: PowerSchool Group, Executive Leadership

From: NCDPI Homebase Leadership Team
RE: North Carolina PowerSchool Issues Periodic review
This letter is a follow-up to our letter sent to Bryan McDonald on December 10, 2015,
where the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction expressed concerns about the
implementation of PowerSchool. As a periodic review, NCDPI would like to reflect
upon the progress that has been made and look to the future on next steps.
Most recently, NCDPI and PowerSchool have successfully deployed updates to the North
Carolina transcript to bring it inline with current policy. Additionally, the deployment of
the Migrant Education module is hailed as a huge success and garnering attention from
other states as North Carolina is the only state to have its Migrant student data and overall
student information together in one system. This allows North Carolina to be on the
leading edge as federal legislation mandates the use of the Migrant student information
exchange provided through the MSIX federal database.
We thank you for working with us to bring these items to fruition. Along with these
successes also come challenges and we look forward to a healthy discussion on the
following concerns.
Infrastructure Failures: Many school districts and charter schools have
experienced significant downtime due to continued Oracle listener issue. An
increase in outages in May resulted in a 2% increase in unavailability, which is
unacceptable. PowerSchool promised North Carolina that the infrastructure
failures would be resolved with the migration to the new hosting environment at
Rackspace. However, the problems continue and user frustration levels are rising.
The temporary solution of rebooting instances is a band-aid approach to a more
significant issue.
Quality Assurance Issues: Broken items are consistently placed in QA for re-test
without being thoroughly vetted or unit tested. NCDPI QA staff time is frequently
spent re-testing items that are delivered broken and in many cases multiple times
for the same item. In some instances, items are released to production that
immediately fail because they are not tested in the proper environment. Software
is often delivered in an untimely manner and NCDPI is frequently given a few
Page 1|3

North Carolina PowerSchool Issues Periodic Review

June 9, 2016

days, and in some cases, a few hours to test prior to the scheduled release.
Previously corrected issues are frequently found to be re-broken in a subsequent
release in both QA and production. Urgent and prioritized defects and issues are
frequently not addressed within a reasonable timeframe. High priority items often
sit for days, sometimes weeks, without tangible results, or progress updates.
PowerSchool is inconsistent in following industry standard procedures for Quality
Assurance.
Project closeout items: NCDPI has requested on several occasions during the last
18 months the Technical Architecture and System Design (TASD) documentation
which describes the system as built for North Carolina. This is required by the NC
State Department of Information Technology in order to close out the
PowerSchool project. PowerSchool provided documentation that is incomplete
and does not reflect the current system. In fact, the information provided is so
subpar that may require a complete overhaul. This has the potential to cause a
delay in closing the project by June 30 and may have a negative effect on
PowerSchool being able to execute any contracts or amendments with NCDPI.
Human Capacity: There continues to be a deficit in human capacity required to
support North Carolina. A critical defect that was reported during the
implementation year took almost three years to be resolved. Much of that effort
revolved around North Carolina having to prove the issue existed and once
identified, another year progressed without resolution. Additionally, other critical
aspects of the implementation have not been fully deployed as the resources
needed to implement our Cross Enrollment solution are critical to so many other
PowerSchool areas; the time needed to get this deployed is again about to reach a
deadline that will cause another years delay to implement with school districts.
Many items are single-threaded either through Julio and/or Lorenzo. We were told
that you have hired additional staff, yet we have not seen a positive impact on the
customization and hosting services for North Carolina.
Transition from In-House Project Support to Operational Support: There has
been a lot of discussion about this subject and we want to put it to bed. We were
given a list of tasks that Greg Parish used to perform while he was based at
NCDPI. The majority of these tasks require technical level access to servers that
NCDPI has no access to, or require contacting various people within different
teams of PowerSchool, in order to coordinate support activities. We provided a
specific response to Dan Gwaltney with the proposed transition steps on the few
items that can be transitioned to NCDPI. As a response we received an SOW and a
bill for Lorenzos services for $105,000. The SOW was actually a template written
for your customers that host locally. It just seemed like a document put together
with little effort in order to attach a bill to it. We have a contract with
Page 2|3

North Carolina PowerSchool Issues Periodic Review

June 9, 2016

PowerSchool that costs more than $7million per year for maintenance, support and
hosting operations; a turn-key solution. We expect that this is sufficient payment
and find it absurd that PowerSchool wants to charge North Carolina extra money
for work performed by specific members of your staff.

Recommendations
Provide adequate number of dedicated PowerSchool staff to North Carolina so that
PowerSchool is not totally dependent on a very few staff members that have
knowledge of the North Carolina implementation.
Ensure technical resources have adequate skills to support North Carolina hosting
operations.
Deliver a permanent solution to the infrastructure issues so that databases will not
continue to either slow-down or become non-responsive. It is unacceptable that an
organization of the size of PowerSchool Group LLC deals with severity-1 type
infrastructure problems for several months without resolution. It is also
unacceptable to throttle the throughput for some districts in order to help other
districts while they are facing slow-downs. It is our opinion that the
infrastructure issues will go away if PowerSchool multiplies the infrastructure
dedicated to North Carolina.
Provide load and performance matrices for the NC PowerSchool infrastructure.
Provide a detailed action plan for the implementation of the additional monitoring
tools that will provide a more secure environment for our users.
Implement industry standard procedures for Quality Assurance and deliver quality
code that has been properly pre-tested and in a timely fashion.
Consider more development towards an enterprise solution that will accommodate
state needs as well as districts needs.
Deliver a quality TASD document that reflects the current PowerSchool system as
built so that we do not go into default with the State Department of Information
Technology on this project.
Provide a timeline as to when NCDPI will receive delivery and resolution to the
above items.

Page 3|3