Case Study
SDA Member Agendas
An organization tool for newly elected members of the SDA
Challenge
To increase the University of Alberta’s Student Design Association (SDA) member accountability regarding their responsibilities and their working knowledge about how to best make use of their peers for any given project.Methods
- Qualitative Research Interviews
- Primary Research
- Design Thinking Project Process
- Prototyping
Outcome
An agenda to help members organize themselves by taking notes at meetings, plan with the use of a calendar and familiarize themselves with all of the roles in the SDA to improve the group’s efficiency and accountibility.
Process
The SDA Board Member Booklets were the result of an in-dept three-month project that employed the design thinking human-centered design process.Goals
Throughout the first steps the project’s goals became to:- Create a portable organization tool for SDA board members.
- Help SDA board members understand and take ownership of their roles.
- Catalyse SDA members’ understanding of the student group’s structure.
Empathize
The process to empathize with the SDA’s needs included interviews with every SDA member of the 2018/2019 board as well as past members, past directors, other student groups and student union members, as well as Edmonton-based professionals with experience in group management.
Some of the key insights from the empathize phase of the project include:
- Many SDA members don’t have an adequate understanding of the group’s digital communications resources. This makes it difficult for certain members to meet their responsibilities.
- The SDA’s transition process occurs when the outgoing team is undergoing academic burnout and is not willing or able to dedicate adequate time to onboarding the incoming team members.
- The SDA uses too many streams of communication that don’t allow for efficient transmission of information, especially for less committed members.
Define
During the define phase the focus was on the first insight from the “empathize” phase of the project, the key insight being:
Many SDA members lack engagement with the group’s own shared Google Drive folder system, this is evident from individual members’ lack of knowledge about ongoing projects as well as from in-meeting discussion about how to best organize our Google Drive to promote proactivity.”
This insight was chosen because it was seen to have the most potential to create more engagement within the SDA.
Key term:
Organizational Carrying Capacity
can be defined as the way in which small teams struggle with the task of using new resources or processing sizable amounts of new information.”In learning about organizational carrying capacity I wondered if members were unable to be more proactive because they were overwhelmed by the amount of information that was either stored or incoming to the SDA’s Google Drive file system.
Whether this was the case or not, members were not engaging with their roles at the expected levels in accordance with the SDA’s constitution.
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This is how I formed the new research question: “How might we better engage SDA members to be proactive members of the team?”
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“How might we better engage SDA members to be proactive members of the team?”
Ideate
The lack of engagement with digital resources made me question if physical planners would positively influence productivity levels.
Physical planners could be required at student group meetings in a way that laptops can’t. These planners could be provided through the SDA at the beginning of the term free of charge. They can also be easily taken anywhere because of their dimensions.
Having a physical tool that can be kept by the group for years to come means that it can be improved upon by each subsequent year if they wish to. The agendas can also be archived for future SDA generations.
Prototype
The prototype for the SDA board member booklets took into account the areas where members seemed to fall behind in. These were namely:
- planning and organizing
- knowledge of the group structure,
- knowledge of the organizations’ goals
Copies of the prototype were printed and bound for each new member of the SDA. The layout for each section can been seen below:
Testing and validation
Below are images of a used board member booklet from 2019/2020 that display how the artifact was used by one of the members to plan and make sense of the SDA and to organize themselves during their year. The images also show the markings that were used to clarify some of the information in this iteration of the Project.
Calendar
Meeting Organizers
Meeting organizers were made so that members are intended to take notes of important details during weekly meetings as well as write down action items for the week with corresponding dates of completion
SDA Role Map
Annual SDA Goals
Reflection
The scope of this
project
shifted various times within the academic year and ultimately led to the creation of the SDA Board Member Booklet. This resource for the SDA is a personal tool that members are encouraged to used and recreate tailored to the needs of the team. I believe that, although this agenda was used by the 2019/2020 SDA board, future teams may choose to go paperless or invest more time in training
the newly elected SDA members to better use the digital filing system on the SDA’s Google Drive. I would also revise the format of the agenda so that members might have more freedom to express their understanding of the group and its goals even further. Later iterations of the agenda should always be created in close collaboration with the team’s graphic design lead.