Presenting my work

I am thinking a lot about my poster these days, as it looks like I will be using it more than once. I have mentioned the technology showcase to my supervisors on several occasions. This week they told me about an initiative to create a larger internship program at the company, and asked if I might be willing to present the poster I am making. Their thought is that other departments may not have thought about how interns can be incorporated into operations. Me presenting what I did for project managers could pave the way for more interns in the future.

I want to make a really great poster so I am thinking a lot about how to use images instead of text. One idea I came up with is to represent my findings from interviews regarding status reports in the following way:
I'm also thinking about making a timeline and workflow diagram to visually represent how my time went. I think I may also be able to visualize some of the data I collected from the card sorting activity. Does this sound like a good plan for a poster. I'm teaching a class this weekend for fellow students on making capstone posters so if you have any good examples, resources, ideas, or advice for posters, I would love to share them.

Adding instruction

This week I decided to help fulfill one of the recommendations that I am making to help keep the wiki up to date. My first recommendation is to make sure that everyone knows how to edit and update the wiki. From very early on in this project, each time I was finishing up one part of the project and talking with my supervisors about the next steps, I have been suggesting that I add some instructional content on how to edit the wiki. Every time, this suggestion got pushed off for other things “within the scope.” My supervisor would point out that the wiki service that we use has a Help section. But the Help section is hard to navigate and it took me some time to figure out how to do things like upload documents and edit documents that have already been uploaded. I know that PMs are not going to spend much time to learn how to do what they need to do. And for me, it is important that people all contribute to the wiki. Otherwise, what’s the point of putting it in a wiki? This week, I finished up what I was working on and had time to create a quick lesson in how to edit an uploaded document and post it.

Encouraging a culture of knowledge sharing

This week I have been doing literature searches to help inform the recommendations that I plan to include in my handover document. The ideas that I am getting to encourage knowledge sharing the literature are all about creating a culture from an individually competitive environment to a team-centered competition. I think that is a hard thing to do, but really the most important factor in success with any knowledge management project. Not only does it take time to document your processes, but you are also giving away the things that you worked so hard to learn and perfect yourself. I suspect that this is the real reason that at least one of the PMs hasn’t ever been able to find time to send me the things he uses. I understand that everyone wants to see and emulate how he does things because he is very successful with client. I can also understand why he doesn’t want to give away all his secrets.

I'm also finding some practical tips such as adding knowledge sharing as an element of performance reviews. I should be popular with the PMs...

Keeping it relevant

Today at my capstone, I got to make a wiki page for someone who was really excited about it. He loved the idea of it, and sent me a lot of academic articles relevant to the area he works in, Change Management, as well as templates and examples of plans and presentations. I love that he was so enthusiastic, but it got me wondering what is going to happen to all my work once I leave. If no one keeps it updated and relevant, it won't be any good anymore. I have an appointment with a Project manager to brainstorm ideas for keeping it relevant. She also wants me to create a "handover document" and make a presentation. I am trying to think of recommendations to make to keep things relevant once I am gone.

I think that keeping an up-to-date knowledge base is probably a problem in every organization, and I'm not sure that there is too much that can really be done to solve it. There are other things that are always more important to get to. There would have to be a really encouraging culture or some kind of reward or consequence to really get people to do this on top of everything else they need to do. Maybe a solution would be to bring in another student in a year to evaluate this?

Fitting everything in

My card sorting activity turned out well. I got data from half my user group. It was interesting to find that when I standardized the similar categories, all but one user sorted the documentation into project management process groups, rather than the project management phases that were originally suggested. I’m sure that I know who that one user is that likes things organized into PMI phases. She is always willing to give her input on what I’m working on, which I really do appreciate. But I am realizing how important having data and numbers is in creating something useful for the majority, not just the most vocal. Numbers are also really helpful in separating my personal thoughts from anyone who might disagree.

I planned to work my normal schedule during spring break, but ended up taking one day off when both my supervisors recommended it. They were both planning to be off and said that I had to enjoy my last spring break. It was really nice today when I came in and found that the coworkers that sit in the cubes surrounding me seemed like they had missed me. I feel like I’m really starting to fit in around there. Today I went for coffee with a project manager who was really complimentary of my work and recommended I talk to my field supervisor about openings at the company that might be a fit for me. I was really excited about that, and am planning to bring it up when I meet with him on Thursday. I think it would be a great company to work for.

Energized after this development and the coffee, I finished with everything that I could do until I get some more documents from some project managers that haven’t gotten back to me yet. I had seen in some meeting notes (that I put up on the wiki) that one of the things that had been deemed “out of scope” for my project was a wiki section on retainer managing so I got permission to move ahead with this until I can finish what I started. I am pretty sure I can get this project I started today done in addition to those things that were within the scope. This should be a good thing to report just before I ask about a job for myself.

Card Sorting It Out

photo from agyorke102 on flickr

I blew at least one person's mind this week. And it was really easy.

Last week I mentioned that I should have done a card sorting activity when I realized people didn't agree on the arrangement we were using. Card sorting is a way to learn how users think information should be organized. Think of a stack of index cards that each have the name of one type of information. You ask users to arrange the cards into piles and then to give each pile a name. This gives you insight on what they think goes together and where they would put things, and essentially look for them.

I went back through my usability class notes while thinking about how to conduct this kind of research with the PMs. I got to the notes from the day we had a pair of guest speakers from a company called Design for Use. They did this activity with us where we categorized bands into genres of music using a software called OptimalSort. OptimalSort is perfect for what I needed to do because PMs can do the activity online in less than ten minutes (It's hard to get time with them). So I set up a test, wrote up an email explaining everything, and sent it out. So far only about a third of them have completed it, but I have had interested responses. I've been excited about this all week, which made the WikiText table formatting I have also been working on a little less miserable.

The best part was when my supervisor stopped my cube on Monday. I excitedly told him that I had had this idea of how to make sure that PMs could find all this information I am putting up for them. He didn't know what card sorting was, and even made a little remark that it sounded very 'librarian.' I explained that it was actually this cutting-edge usability thing that his User Experience Engineers were using, and gave him a little demo and a sample of the dendrograms and matrices it displays post testing data with. Like I said, his mind was blown.