Worlducation is a social startup that manufactures tablet computers for primary school students. They not only focus on the hardware, but they also have a competitive team creating software, content and activities to better engage and educate the students.

Worlducation aims to change the way children learn at school by implementing artificial intelligence technology that can follow up on each child's progress and adjust to their needs as they learn, creating the optimal path learning experience.

So far, Worlducation only sells their tablet computers business to business (B2B) as they realised that their content and hardware proved most effective when a whole classroom was using it, and a teacher was coordinating the activities. Also, this helped the sales team focus on larger sales, and minimised the potential number of problems that could arise from individual customers. However, the long-term plan is to also tackle a business to consumer strategy (B2C).

What makes Worlducation completely different from their competition is that they envision a world in which every child learns how to read and write - a world without illiteracy. Given this vision, for every classroom that buys their products, they donate and train a classroom somewhere around the world that can't afford the same technology. Furthermore, they connect the two classrooms (those who bought the products and services and those who received the donation) so that they can grow together and collaborate throughout their learning cycle.

Worlducation was founded in 2016, and by the end of 2019 they had sold over 35,000 tablets to over 550 schools in 23 countries, generating revenue in hardware sales and software subscriptions.

Worlducation headquarters are in Sydney's CBD but they have a development team in Bulgaria, a manufacturing team in Hong Kong, and operation and marketing staff in Colombia, Egypt, Iceland, Russia and the Philippines.

Worlducation started 2020 with a huge sale to a school in Portugal. Although it was a great start, the context for the rest of the quarter was highly uncertain due to COVID-19. Surprisingly the pandemic brought hundreds of new leads and that led to an unprecedented growth that brought alongside dozens of operation and production problems.

The factory in Hong Kong closed down for 1 month due to government restrictions limiting supply, the sales team was overwhelmed with sale meetings over ZOOM, the tech-support team had to re-adapt the software to remote learning for many of the schools, and the founders had to start thinking on how education was going to change after this worldwide event.

The investors at Worlducation think that is time to bring some fresh ideas and they invite you to join the management team. It's your time to step in and make changes so that the business can keep growing, and the team culture shows strength in these strange times.

During your first days on the job you realise that one of the biggest problems that have risen during the latest months is a virtual disorganisation.

Having different team members in different parts of the world, working in different time schedules and with complementary tasks have led to an online chaos of files, inefficiencies and lost sales.

Currently the business is very heavy on internal emails and Whatsapp groups. Systems like Slack and Trello have been used but never fully embraced. Something very particular that you realise is that everyone is still working on offline files on their computers and sharing them as attachments on emails. There are no collaborative files.

The team has not only lost many deals due to this disorganisation, but it's also starting to affect their morale and energy as sometimes they start the day with over 100 emails from other team members that work in different time-zones, and due to ineffective communication, a full day might be lost for very small details in file sharing.

You make the decision to implement a system that will improve efficiency, reduce unnecessary emails, obsolete files and most importantly, organise the team all over the world.

The budget is small - a maximum of $2,500 annually.

Assumptions:

For the purpose of this assessment, you are to assume that you need to implement a system suitable for a maximum of 10 users and it needs to have a free trial version you can use during the implementation stage of this assessment.

Assume there are no external training costs and that this will be managed by you as you have experience in using the system.