Organizations are pressed with the need to engage, retain, and upskill employees with many positions staying fully or partially remote as the pandemic continues. The Center for Digital Government (CDG) reports that 74% of state and local governments believe they will continue hybrid operations for the long-term. This transition is the latest in a long list of reasons agencies are looking for solutions to help train their workforce digitally. Some have found Google Classroom to be the perfect solution.

The State of Iowa knew about the advantages of digital classrooms even before the pandemic. They were already successfully using Google Classroom for in-person training, making the transition to digital seamless when the state closed down. Jessica Van Heuveln, a Google support specialist for the State of Iowa CIO’s Office, says the switch to digital doesn’t deprive workers of hands-on training. “You can use Google Classroom for many different environments, so if you’re doing self-taught, in-person or virtual training, it’s going to work with all those approaches.”

The logistics of a digital classroom

Iowa uses Google Classroom to onboard and upskill employees as well as train volunteers. When the pandemic shifted the state’s workforce to 70% working from home, they needed a  platform that could not only handle a vast range of topics and teaching styles to support remote workers but also scale to meet their demand. Van Heuveln notes that Google Classroom was particularly helpful for handling compliance training, especially with its integration with Google Meet. These trainings often require an entire sector of the workforce to attend a single class with more than 100 attendees, according to Van Heuveln. The logistics of these larger sessions cuts down on the number of total sessions the state needs to host. Iowa also found that employees were less apprehensive about learning when they could do it from the comfort of their own homes.

Iowa follows a train-the-trainer model to train employees expected to instruct using Google Classroom. Trainers working in departments across the state learn to use Google Classroom to create and host virtual learning experiences specific to their own departments. 

Collaborative classrooms made simple

Google Classroom meets many needs for Iowa, such as setting up training, managing attendance, reviewing uploaded coursework, and communicating with attendees. Both course attendees and trainers have everything they need in one place, and robust engagement tools help attendees stay focused while giving trainers the feedback they need from their lessons. Built-in survey options let trainers gauge attendee knowledge, and the chat function ensures no one ever misses a question. The reporting dashboard gives trainers access to analytics to track engagement and attendance, providing insights that can improve future training sessions.

Google Classroom also makes it easier to ensure attendees stay on board throughout the training program. Coursework can be uploaded directly into Google Classroom, and training sessions can be recorded and archived. This feature allows employees to work at their own pace or lets them catch up when a scheduling conflict means they might miss a session.

The enterprise version of Google Classroom Iowa uses interfaces with other Google Workspace tools such as Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Gmail, which streamlines training and leads to more collaboration between employees and trainers. It can also interface with applications from other providers, further boosting its utility as an effective virtual classroom. Google Drive stores training materials securely. Lastly, Google Classroom enterprise comes with 24/7 support to make sure agencies always have everything they need for success.

Helping employees be better prepared to serve

Google Classroom can be a powerful part of any training program, whether it be digital or in-person. Building virtual connections empowers organizations to deliver better experiences. Google Classroom is helping the State of Iowa accomplish this for their constituents. Designed to scale and be accessible from anywhere, the platform helps public employees better serve the public. Virtual training strategies are essential for agencies that are looking to grow their workforce and build employee skill levels. The most important thing, however, is that training programs enable employees to further your agency’s mission. To learn more about Google Classroom and see more solutions designed with government in mind, check out the Google Cloud for government page.

At Cardinal Group, we have four distinct lines of business, each of which are critical to our overall company performance: real estate investment, third-party property management, construction management, and marketing.

As the VP of IT and Data, one of my top priorities is giving each of our team members across these teams the tools they need to be productive, while also ensuring all of our company’s data is safe, secure, and properly managed. And with a variety of different business units, it’s critical that our team members are able to collaborate effectively across teams. We rely heavily on Google Drive and G Suite to help us accomplish these goals.

Prior to partnering with Google, we relied on a legacy content storage and management solution. Our team members found this tool cumbersome and unintuitive—finding the right file at the right time was very difficult, and it was challenging to collaborate and share content effectively across the various teams within our company.

We also struggled with document ownership and version control. One team would start working on a contract, and then share it with a collaborator over email, who would then share it with a third collaborator, and so on. It was never clear which version of the document was the most up to date, who owned it, and who should be working on it. Our team members relied on these tools every day to get their jobs done, and the subpar experience was impacting productivity and morale. 

Moving toward a more collaborative company culture

We began to explore various solutions to these problems, and quickly realized that Google’s approach to productivity was most closely aligned with Cardinal Group’s desire to build a more collaborative and innovative culture. We worked closely with Cloudbakers, a Google partner, to migrate all of our existing content and data to Drive.

And most of our team members were already familiar with Drive and found it very intuitive and easy to use, so change management was minimal and we were quickly up and running. 

With Drive, it’s easy for our team members to quickly find and access the files they need at that moment, which saves them valuable time and increases productivity across our teams. Live, real-time collaboration across Drive and our other G Suite apps is a huge selling point for us.

For example, if we’re building a marketing plan, our onsite, marketing, and operations teams can all work simultaneously on the same plan, which saves us a ton of time and also eliminates version control and ownership issues. We’re also moving towards a “work from anywhere” model, and Drive is a huge enabler of this transition, with team members able to easily access and collaborate on files, whether they’re working in our main office, at home, or at a customer’s community. 

Fewer support tickets lets IT spend time on more impactful projects

Since we started working with Google a few years ago, our company has grown significantly, from 800 to 1,400 team members. During this tremendous growth, the number of productivity-related support tickets we see has remained flat; this translates to a 43% decline in the number of support tickets per team member. As a result, our team members can spend more time being productive and my IT team can focus less on resolving support tickets and more on creating business value for Cardinal Group and our team members. 

Moving to Google Drive and G Suite has been a big part of our journey towards being a more collaborative and innovative company. We’re looking forward to continuing this partnership with Google and we’re excited to see what’s next!

Poll three Site Reliability Engineers with the question “What is SRE?” and you’re likely to get five different answers: an implementation of DevOps, a role, a set of practices, a cultural shift, a snazzy title. While these definitions may not necessarily align with those in the SRE books, there is one throughline differentiating SRE from other ways of working: Service Level Objectives (SLOs). While simple to understand – intentionally! – SLOs are frequently challenging to define in practice. And even though the specifics of an SLO vary across industries and verticals, we have found there are a number of practices and strategies common amongst teams that have successfully implemented SLOs for their workloads. 

Bringing together product, development, and SRE teams to achieve a common understanding of the workload in question, and in particular its critical user journeys (CUJ), is a key first step. For many teams this means writing down, often for the first time, detailed sequence or flow diagrams for these CUJs. The maturity of and the relationship between the three “legs of the stool” (development, product, and SRE) will play a role in the level of effort required to complete this first step of the journey. Having a common understanding of your users’ expectations of your workload is a prerequisite to writing effective SLOs.

While modeling user journeys and decomposing them into SLOs is an art and no two applications are alike, there are a few key aspects upon which to anchor your discussion. The main question we recommend you keep top-of-mind when going through this process is “What do my users care about?” Framing your thought process in this way prevents implementation snafus and strategies that don’t approximate user expectations. Other aspects to consider include:

• Are there breakpoints where the user may choose not to take an action?
• Which parts of the interaction are we capable of measuring and which are we not (e.g., third-party dependencies)?
• Which parts of the user journey are common across many user journeys and thus are possible candidates for factoring out as their own CUJ (example: login)?
• Which parts of the journey can be measured in aggregate, and which must be separated because of differences in criticality, request rates, or other factors?
• Which steps of the journey have strict dependencies between one another?

Armed with answers to these questions, a detailed request diagram, and your application code, you’re ready to start putting pen to paper! Before jumping into your monitoring consoles, we recommend writing up an SLO design document which lays out the technical details of your chosen SLOs. We’ve made a template available to you to jump start this process (if you have a Google account, you can make a copy using this link). In it, you’ll find an empty template along with worked examples for reference as you create your own specifications. Whether you use this template or not, we recommend the following as you document your SLOs:

• Be pedantic with technical specifications – they will matter during implementation
• Maintain a section outlining clarifications, caveats, and/or tradeoffs made as a part of the design process
• Consider where you’re measuring – make sure it’s feasible
• Beware of summaries, averages, and other non-aggregatable statistics for latency SLOs
• Keep compliance periods consistent across your workload(s)

• We recommend the following defaults:
  • 28 days rolling for operational needs (error budget alerting)
  • Fixed calendar quarters for prioritization and lookback
• Changelog: Include one, even if your documentation tool has version history, so you can track major changes
• Put your SLO documentation in a location accessible by your team and company stakeholders
• Once your SLO PRD is finalized, treat your implementation as code and store it in your version control system
  • Remember – DRY!

We hope these recommendations and template give you a head start in bringing your SLOs to production. If you find yourself in need of a tool to implement your SLOs, consider Google Cloud SLO Monitoring which allows you to create SLOs for any metric available in Google Cloud Monitoring and computes your error budget automatically, enabling burn rate-based alerting. If this process still feels daunting or you find your team in need of help with any of the above, our reliability engineering professional services team can assist. For more information, visit cloud.google.com/sre or you can contact your Google Cloud account team.

We’re excited to share the news that leading global research and advisory firm Forrester Research has named Google AppSheet a Leader in the recently released report The Forrester Wave™: Low-code Platforms for Business Developers, Q4 2021. It’s our treasured community of business developers—those closest to the challenges that line-of-business apps can solve—who deserve credit for not only the millions of apps created with AppSheet, but also the collaborative approach to no-code development that has helped further our mission of empowering everyone to build custom solutions to reclaim their time and talent. 

AppSheet received the highest marks possible in the product vision and planned enhancements criteria, with Forrester noting in the report that “AppSheet’s vision for AI-infused-and-supported citizen development is unique and particularly well suited to Google. The tech giant’s deep pockets and ecosystem give AppSheet an advantage in its path to market, market visibility, and product roadmap.”

“Features for process automation and AI are leading,” remarking that, “The platform provides a clean, intuitive modeling environment suitable for both long-running processes and triggered automations, as well as a useful range of pragmatic AI services such as document ingestion.”

Many enterprise customers including Carrefour Property – Carmila, Globe Telecom, American Electric Power, and Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) choose AppSheet as their business developer partner, along with thousands of other organizations in every industry. We are honored to serve these customers and to be a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Low-code Platforms for Business Developers. We look forward to continuing to innovate and to helping customers on their digital transformation journey. To download the full report, visit here and enter your email address. To learn more about AppSheet, visit our website.