Phase 6: Go Live with Clarity & Beyond

Actions

• Develop a training plan for end users/agency managers. Define the training methodology (online vs. in-person), the schedule, logistics (e.g., venue, end users), and the dissemination of information
• Develop a training plan for refresher training, including content, interval, and delivery method
• Establish additional training requirements (e.g., Looker/Data Analysis)

In Phase 4 you made a plan for user support, part of which was training for your Clarity users. Now is the time to put that plan in place. At a minimum, it will be most important to offer general training for new users so that they can begin using the system, but ultimately, you should consider role-specific training, topic-specific training, and a regular refresher training schedule.

• Use our training outline and Help Center to help you formulate training content
• We recommend training users right before they access the system so that they can immediately apply what they learned

Resources

Clarity Human Services Training Outline↗

Bitfocus Help Center↗

Actions

• Implement procedures for collecting data (e.g., data collection tools) and communicating during the blackout

The blackout period is the last step before you go live in Clarity! Remember, this is the time when you won’t be able to access your legacy system or Clarity because data is being migrated from one system to the other.

In section 4, you identified your community’s policies around HMIS outages. Now that you’re preparing for your blackout period, it’s time to act on those policies. 

Actions

• Communicate with end users about go-live and how to access support 
• Celebrate your accomplishments!

Congratulations! You made it! You’re going live with Clarity Human Services! You put so much effort into preparing for this moment, and it’s finally here. Great job!

This is an exciting time, and it’s rewarding to see all of your hard work pay off, but don’t forget that this is still a time of change, and some folks struggle with change. Be sure to communicate with everyone and keep checking in!

Actions

• Implement user support plan

Now that your users are digging into Clarity, they’re bound to have questions. Now’s the time to put in place the user support plan you created in section 4 to help get them the answers they need. And don’t forget that our Help Center is always available!

Resources

Bitfocus Help Center↗

Actions

• Explore Clarity's pre-built dashboards to determine if they meet any existing needs
• Begin developing custom reports for system monitoring

As your community settles into using Clarity, it’s time to dig into our data analysis tools to make sure that your data needs are met. Although your community will have specific data needs, we recommend the following resources to start:

• The Clarity Report Library for critical reports like the APR, HUD System Performance Measures, and the HUD Data Quality report
• The data analysis dashboard library
• Clarity Data Analysis tools for custom data needs

Need additional support to get the data you need? Check out our Report Builder Certification, or talk to your Bitfocus account manager about joining a live training cohort!

Resources

Help Center: [HUDX-227] Annual Performance Report↗

Help Center: [HUDX-223-AD] System Performance Measures↗

Help Center: [HUDX-225] HMIS Data Quality Report↗

Help Center: Introduction to The Data Analysis Tool and Looker Resources↗

Actions

• Determine which custom files your community wants to migrate to Clarity and the priority in which they should be imported
• Determine if your community requires additional assistance from Bitfocus for custom migration phase

The final step in your move to Clarity Human Services is migrating your “custom data” -- all of the data that you still need but that wasn’t part of your HUD data migration. We’ll provide you with our data import schema, and you’ll work to format your data to meet the schema requirements. This can be a time-consuming process because data migration requires detailed attention to potentially thousands of records. It’s a good idea to evaluate what data is truly critical to your system and what data is merely “nice to have” and then prioritize your migration plan accordingly.

Bitfocus staff can also do this work for you, significantly reducing the amount of time and effort needed for your data migration. Let us know if you’re interested in exploring that option.