Ed-Fi Implementation Partner Badge

Owned by David Clements
Last updated: Dec 04, 2023
2 min read

To be awarded this badge, a vendor must be able to demonstrate adherence to Ed-Fi best practices and their services must facilitate Ed-Fi data standards delivery in their customer's solutions.

Requirements

  • Verifications - Quality
    Like other badges, a verifying agency/company is required. The nature of the verification is important due to the custom nature of offering implementation services.
    • The verified vendor implementation must also be badged/certified to qualify as a verification. This is required to ensure that implementation services are following best practices and current certification/badging requirements.
    • Collaboratives or regional service centers can provide verification if their solution is badged as a “Ed-Fi Managed ODS API Platform Badge”
    • Ed-Fi may use a developer to look at code of the implementation to look for best practices (e.g. look for multi-threading in code to support best practice)
    • Verifications from individual LEAs\SEAs require a deeper validation than other means to ensure adherence to Ed-Fi standards and repetability.  Vendors should consider productizing their service for more streamlined scale-ability.  Part of this verification includes validation Ed-Fi core components are used, code inspection to validate that best practices are being used, and reviewing processes exist for repeatability.
  • Verifications - Quantity
    Unlike other badges, the Implementation Partner badge requires two verifications. Due to the custom nature of implementations Ed-Fi requires a second verification to demonstrate repeatability in the marketplace.
  • Proof of repeatability
    Implementation partners must demonstrate their services are “productized” for future customers. Examples of evidence includes re-usable development packages, re-usable project plans, and/or detailed implementation documentation. These documents can be internal intellectual property but must be shared with Ed-Fi with enough detail to verify their existence and usage.
  • Participation in the Ed-Fi community
    Implementation partners must be in the Ed-Fi partner program. Partnership requires active participation in governance and the community. Implementation partners enable Ed-Fi throughout the community and provide a conduit between their customer base and current Ed-Fi practices.
  • Academy Track
    Implementation Partner should have at least 1 person on staff for each Ed-Fi project that has gone through all the Academy tracks involving Ed-Fi overview and best practices.
  • Ed-Fi Project Retrospective Participation
    Any project can be reported to Ed-Fi for a group retrospective. This can be done during mid-project reviews or as the project is closed out.  Lessons learned from the retrospective can identify gaps in best practices and will be used to anonymously update Ed-Fi’s best practices and guidance. Badge removal may occur if the retrospective identifies gaps in quality and repeatability by a badged vendor that are not resolved after an appropriate time.

Provisional Badges
The requirement for existing successful customers can be a challenging obstacle for new companies entering this space. New companies can apply for a provisional badge which will require a more thorough review for best practices and evidence of repeatability. The badge will be provisional until the appropriate verifications are provided.  The first projects will go through the project retrospective process so Ed-Fi can evaluate the project’s implementations against Ed-Fi standards and best practices.