Norfolk County Implements Power BI for COVID-19 Tracking

by Homegrown Development March 30, 2022

CHALLENGE

Norfolk Public Schools is a school district located in Norfolk County, Virginia. As one of the largest school districts in the state, Norfolk Public Schools was looking for an efficient means of tracking COVID-19 infection and regulation requirement compliance for all employees across their 64 schools and facilities. This tracking process was originally being done manually in Excel.

SOLUTION

HGS delivered an interactive Power BI dashboard that would allow Norfolk Public Schools Chief HR Officer to track COVID-19 information for all employees in the county. This included infection status, vaccination status, and testing compliance for all faculty and staff.

TECHNOLOGY

The technology stack consisted of a Power BI dashboard drawing data from Microsoft forms to a SharePoint hosted Excel file. The employees of Norfolk Public Schools enter their data into a Microsoft forms survey. From here, the data is automatically written into an Excel spreadsheet hosted in SharePoint.

TEAM

The Norfolk Public Schools team consisted of a project manager and a technical lead.

DELIVERY

Through an agile process, the team was able to continuously integrate feedback throughout the design and development process. New add-ons and modifications based on the district’s needs and evolving circumstances regarding the pandemic were provided with rapid turnaround. Microsoft Teams was used for project management, allowing Norfolk Public Schools to stay in contact with the HGS team at all times.

IMPACT

With the help of HGS, Norfolk Public Schools has been able to use the dashboard to efficiently track COVID-19 data for over 5,000 employees. The custom dashboard includes navigation capabilities, allowing users to select which data they would like to view, including employee vaccination status, weekly testing results, and regulation compliance.

All data and visualizations can be filtered by school building. This has allowed the district to seamlessly find out which schools across the county have the highest rates of infection and determine what precautionary quarantine measures need to be taken.

Furthermore, this project involved the migration of the district’s data from Excel to SharePoint. This eliminated the need for an individual to host the spreadsheet locally, increasing reliability and efficiency. With this new technology, Norfolk Public Schools has been able to keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control across the school district.